HCL 530: Healthcare Capstone: Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Leadership

Students enter this course with an organizational analysis, a financial case, and a policy and ethics framework already in place, and bring all that work to completion through a fully developed Capstone Research Project centered on a real quality improvement challenge within a healthcare organization. The course focuses on performance measurement, patient safety frameworks, error reduction, and system-level approaches to reducing variation in care, equipping students to identify a meaningful QI problem, build the evidence base for addressing it, and communicate their findings in a formal leadership document. The capstone demonstrates that a student can integrate systems thinking, financial reasoning, policy awareness, and quality improvement leadership into a single, coherent work product, and reflects the kind of thinking that distinguishes a capable manager from an effective organizational leader.