UPMC Wolff Learning Academy of UPMC
Improving Quality and Patient Safety through Education and Training

UPMC has earned a rich reputation for delivering excellence and innovation in healthcare, particularly to patients with complex and severe medical problems. As the largest non-governmental employer in Pennsylvania, UPMC integrates more than 92,000 employees, 40 hospitals, over 800 doctors’ offices and outpatient sites, and more than 4 million members of the Insurance Services Division, which is the largest medical insurer in western Pennsylvania.
Since inception, UPMC has been on a mission to provide the appropriate care, in the right manner, at the right time to every patient. As the region’s pre-eminent academic medical center and one of the nation’s top-ranked hospital systems, it takes a leading role in achieving continuous quality and safety improvement.
Supporting these transformational efforts is the Wolff Center at UPMC. The Wolff Center partners with colleagues system wide to improve health care delivery and the overall experience for their patients and members. Things don’t quite stop there!
To meet the quality and safety education needs of healthcare professionals, including executives, physicians, directors/managers, and clinical staff, the Wolff Center established the Wolff Learning Academy (WLA) in 2019. The learning academy provides education, tools, and resources based on reliability and improvement science to improve healthcare outcomes through online, hybrid and in-person education programs.
The WLA works throughout the UPMC system to provide dynamic and clinically up-to-date education on a range of topics. Collaborating with clinical experts, the WLA creates education resources that reinforce the mission of safe and reliable patient-centered care.

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“Our goal is to empower staff with the tools and the information that they need to provide excellent care,” Cindy A Liberi, Senior Director, Quality Education and Performance Outcomes at UPMC.
Being a major hub for best-in-class patient care education, the WLA provides virtual quality improvement education to lead physicians and other care providers through the QI process to promote advanced and improved quality of care. In addition to offering virtual, on-demand, flexible learning modules on a variety of quality and safety topics that are free of charge for employees and affiliated personnel, the Academy offers structured, project-based programs for novice and advanced QI learners. Along with internal and external experts, the Quality Education Series programs offer each participant and their team regular check-ins and mentoring with quality improvement coaches from the Wolff Center. Two such recent projects included a physician-led group project focused on reducing outpatient MRI backlogs, and the second was a project for reducing sepsis mortality through early detection in the emergency department.
The Academy’s distinctive feature is that its backbone is a web-based curriculum-building system. It enables the transmission of asynchronous content using a web-based learning environment. WLA is also integrated with a scheduling system that supports complementing face-to-face training, enabling hybrid technique training programs to be efficiently supported. Additionally, it contains a powerful quiz, survey, and evaluation engine that assists in tracking progress as well as developing internal quality improvement so that they can continue to improve the programs.
Looking ahead towards 2022, the WLA intends to increase the quality and safety of care through educating staff and affiliated personnel in the science of quality improvement and patient safety and will be implementing new programs that complement traditional on-boarding training. “We are continuing to work to expand our workforce knowledge and competencies in quality improvement and safety which are critical to providing the highest quality and safest care to our patients.” says Dr. Paul Phrampus, Medical Director, Patient Safety of the UPMC Health System.