The NCPIQE (NC Physician Institute for Quality Enhancement) is a program within the NCMS Foundation. Its purpose is to establish an infrastructure and resources to support Quality Improvement processes for specialty medical care in North Carolina.  NCPIQE will collaborate with NC Center for Hospital Quality and Patient Safety (please see http://www.ncqualitycenter.org/) to provide support to physicians as “champions” for quality improvement in their practice environment. 

An integral component of the NCPIQE is the Quality Fellows Program. This pilot program targets orthopedic surgeons and will further develop their skills in clinical quality improvement. Three orthopedic surgeons have been selected to participate in the Fellows Program.  They will participate with the NC SCIP Collaborative team leader in their hospital and learn to be an effective change agent and leader within their surgical team. 

NCPIQE will work with physicians to participate in Care registries, identify improvement opportunities from these registries and other data sources, develop problem statements and create project teams to develop, test and implement process improvements. 

On Friday August 27 and Saturday August 28, Wake AHEC and the NC Medical Society Foundation will present an interactive, hands-on workshop designed for physicians who have been asked or who seek to champion healthcare improvement through the use of quality improvement processes in their office or hospital settings. For more information, click here. Although the workshop was designed to provide baseline quality improvement concepts to the Quality Fellows Program participants, there will be space available for NCMS members and non-members on a first come basis. The workshop is free to the Quality Fellows Program participants. 

Funding for this project was provided by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation.