It’s All About Quality

In an industry that focuses on Curriculum Management, the solutions available to schools have historically been Curriculum Management Systems exclusively.

When we began working on OpalQM in 2010, the Google search “Curriculum Management for Medical Schools” returned a good list of solutions and approaches at different schools; but the top hit in a search for “Quality Management for Medical Schools” was a paper published in 1998. Yet, in conversations with Associate Deans and IT Directors at medical schools across North America, a common comment in 2010 was, “Of course, it’s all about Quality.” So, if Quality was the problem that needed solving, why were there no Medical School Quality Management Systems out there?

And so, OpalQM was born.

In OpalQM, we’ve set out to help you improve Quality across your school. To borrow from a concept made popular by Dr. W. Edwards Deming, it means helping you:

• Plan: Institutionalize the educational processes that you intend to follow
• Do: Deliver the tools to execute those processes
• Check: Report on the organization-wide metrics that indicate how you’re doing
• Act: Drill into where the problem areas are, and address them
  

This means that OpalQM still provides the features you need from an undergraduate and graduate medical education system. But it also means that OpalQM provides an organization-wide Business Intelligence suite that can integrate with systems across your school, and provide you with a depth of information about the Quality of your educational programs that you just can’t get anywhere else.