High Reliability
Healthcare
Systems
From reactive to resilient — building healthcare systems that are consistently safe, every time, for every patient. A structured 6-lesson course grounded in high reliability science, safety culture, and practical organizational application.
Six core
competency
areas
Why Systems Fail
Understand why preventable harm persists and how person-focused approaches perpetuate unsafe systems.
Anatomy of Harm
Apply systems thinking to analyze how failures occur through latent conditions, active failures, and human factors.
HRO Principles
Master the five principles of High Reliability Organizations and apply them to healthcare environments.
Safety Culture
Build Just Culture, psychological safety, and leadership behaviors that make speaking up the norm.
Reliable Process Design
Design systems that perform consistently through standardization, human factors, and reliability science.
Leading the HRO Journey
Sustain reliability through governance, measurement, learning systems, and front-line leadership at every level.
What this
course is about
The challenge
Despite the dedication of healthcare professionals worldwide, preventable harm continues to affect millions of patients each year. Traditional responses focus on individual performance — retraining, disciplining, or replacing the people involved. These approaches consistently fail to prevent the next event because they miss the root of the problem: the system.
The High Reliability approach
High Reliability Organizations (HROs) — drawn from aviation, nuclear power, and naval operations — demonstrate that it is possible to operate complex, high-risk systems with extraordinarily low rates of failure. This course applies that science to healthcare: what HROs do differently, how they think about failure, and how their principles can be embedded into the culture and processes of healthcare organizations.
What makes this course different
This is not a theoretical course. Every lesson is grounded in real healthcare scenarios, structured reflection, and practical application. It is designed for professionals at every level — from frontline clinicians to quality leaders to administrators — who want to understand and advance high reliability in their own organizations.
Each lesson includes a core reading, original case study, reflection prompt, and knowledge check. The course is entirely text-based and self-paced — designed to be studied in full or one lesson at a time across a week.
High Reliability Healthcare Systems
Learning Path — 6 Lessons
Designed for
every healthcare
professional
High reliability is not the responsibility of leaders alone. Every professional who delivers, supports, or governs healthcare has a role in building safer systems.
IHI Open School
Recommended Reading
GIHQS recommends the following IHI Open School courses as supplementary resources to deepen understanding of concepts covered in this course:
IHI Open School courses are available at ihi.org. GIHQS is not affiliated with IHI.
