Welcome to the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative — Spreading Quality and Containing Costs

The Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI) is one of the nation’s first regional collaboratives of medical, business and civic leaders organized to address healthcare safety and quality improvements.

Since its founding in 1997, PRHI has approached quality improvement as both a social and a business imperative. Its core mission is to show that an unwavering focus on meeting patient needs, and on achieving optimal care outcomes, along with simultaneous dedication to efficiency and zero defects, will create maximum value for the patient and for society.

To achieve its ambitious mission, PRHI developed its own process improvement methodology called Perfecting Patient Care^SM (PPC) based on industrial engineering principles articulated by W. Edwards Deming, applied early as the Toyota Production System and later known as Lean manufacturing.

Much of PRHI’s recent work is detailed in the book, Moving Beyond Repair: Perfecting Health Care (March 2012). Moving Beyond Repair is a call for applying lean-based tools to full functionality in hospitals, physician practices and nursing homes, in order to move beyond targeted problem-solving to transforming the way both organizations and healthcare systems achieve, spread and sustain value. Its goal is to show what’s possible and to excite health providers to design their own transformations in the combined interest of quality, safety, and efficiency.