From Physical Therapist to a role in Healthcare Quality

Dr. Brandy Wilkins is a physical therapist, healthcare quality consultant, career coach, podcast hostess, and entrepreneur. She is the founder ofDefining Point Coaching and Consulting, LLC. as well as a seasoned healthcare quality expert. Below, she dives into “what is healthcare quality?” and gives tips on deciding if this is a career path for you.

So, what is healthcare quality (HQ)? Isn’t healthcare supposed to be high quality? Well yes, but it’s so much more than that. As a clinician, our clinical expertise puts us in a unique position to both serve patients with quality, while also describing and improving the processes around patient care quality.

Confused? Don’t worry. I got you — keep reading below…you might just find healthcare quality is the career step for you.

Let’s dive in.

Question 1: What is healthcare quality?
Question 2: What types of healthcare quality roles are out there?
Question 3: Is healthcare quality a career for me?
Question 4: How do I get a job in healthcare quality? (+ resources!)

Question 1: What is healthcare quality?

Healthcare Quality is an umbrella term that is used to describe all the ways that we keep patients safe in healthcare. So, it could be patient safety. It could be patient experience. It could be process improvement. It could be health equity and access to care and population health. It could be working on an electronic medical record or a piece of healthcare technology that’s going to help the patient get to their appointments or do exercises. All of these things that impact the patient can fall under the umbrella ofhealthcare quality.

In terms of a definition, healthcare quality is about providing safe patient care and preventing avoidable harm. I like to define it as patient centered care that is safe, equitable, and data-driven. Those that are in healthcare quality are focused on producing desired outcomes, but it’s more than the doctors and nurses and therapists and many of the frontline team members. It’s about the systems that’s in place to support those in direct patient care and making it easier to do the right thing and harder to do the wrong thing.

Question 2: What types of healthcare quality roles are out there?

There are lots of different types of healthcare quality roles. It could be regulatory and compliance. It could be process improvement in terms of making processes safer, easier, less steps, or more structured and streamlined. Clinicians are a great fit for healthcare quality because we have the clinical expertise to understand things from the patient’s perspective and how things really work and not just in theory. But how things work in practice. We have a great understanding of processes and we think in steps. A lot of people that are therapists or nurses or physicians are used to thinking in steps in terms of how our day is structured or how we think about doing an evaluation or an assessment.

Also you have to be flexible as a healthcare quality professional because in a lot of roles you are helping out the frontline teams and the different clinical and non clinical teams but they don’t directly report to you. So you have to lead by influence instead of by authority, you have to build rapport and trust and understand the other priorities that these teams have as well.

Question 3: Is healthcare quality a career for me?

Healthcare quality isn’t for you if you don’t like working with people or you like for things to be just black & white. There is some gray and there are nuances with how things are done and one team may do it 1 way, and a different team may do it a different way even in an effort to be standardized.

When you’re working with people, whether it is patients or colleagues, they don’t always present like a textbook. So you have to be flexible and willing to live in ambiguity sometimes.

Some resources that I have found that have helped me along my journey are from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, or IHI. They have some really good resources. Some are free and some are paid, but it’s a really good way to get started on understanding what healthcare quality and patient safety is.

Question 4: How do I get a job in healthcare quality? (+ resources!)

How to get into a HQ role:

1. Decide which subset of HQ best fits you.
2. Determine which transferable skills you have that align with that role, or start volunteering for projects to build those skills.
3. Connect with people in roles that you desire — get their perspective, pros/cons, and salary ranges.
4. Revamp your resume to be less clinical, more process and project focused.

What does that mean, exactly, you wonder?

Let’s say you’re a physical therapist and looking for your first HQ role.

First, you decide that a performance improvement specialist is the HQ role for you based on your enjoyment and understanding of processes in the clinic. You may like to work with students and manage their schedule and workflow, as an example. Or you may like identifying ways to make the time you take to document shorter, using smart phrases. You would want to highlight those skills on your resume. Focus more on the projects you were a part of, and the problems you solved, and highlight that on your resume. I worked in acute care for a long time, so most of my examples come from that. In acute care, we have highly complex and acute patients. We think quickly on our feet, sometimes with ambiguity. We collaborate with interdisciplinary teams. We make discharge recommendations with limited information sometimes. All of those are skills that directly translate to HQ roles. You can also upskill with different courses (see below), but be sure you can speak to how you use the skills you learned.

• IHI Open School
• The ACS Quality Improvement Course: The Basics

So thinking about healthcare quality as a potential career option beyond the clinic? Go for it, and reach out if you ever need anything. You got this.