Nila Radhakrishnan, MD 
Michele Lossius, MD, FAAP Your QI Work and Academic Promotion
Your contributions to quality improvement and patient safety are vital, but demonstrating their value in a traditional promotion packet can be a challenge. How do you ensure your leadership on a root-cause analysis or the curriculum you developed on safety protocols is fully recognized? The key is to systematically document and frame your achievements in a language that academic promotion committees will understand and value.
One solution is the Quality Portfolio, a framework developed by the Society of General Internal Medicine to address this exact issue. The portfolio helps you organize your work into six distinct categories, from project activities to leadership roles, creating a comprehensive picture of your impact. It begins with a personal faculty narrative, allowing you to tell your unique QI story and set the stage for the detailed accomplishments that follow. This portfolio provides a structure you can use to make a strong, clear argument for your promotion based on your essential QI contributions.
Resources
The resources below provide the expert guidance you need to get started with developing your Quality Portfolio.
The Quality Portfolio and Faculty Narrative
Learn how the Quality Portfolio helps clinicians showcase their QI and patient safety work for academic promotion. This resource highlights the faculty narrative—a concise, reflective summary that frames your contributions and sets the stage for recognition.
Quality Portfolio Categories
See how to structure your Quality Portfolio across six categories—from leadership and projects to teaching, research, and recognition—so your QI and safety work is clearly documented for promotion.
Aligning QI Work and Faculty Promotion
These resources provide practical strategies for aligning your quality improvement and patient safety efforts with academic promotion criteria, showing you how to frame your contributions across clinical, educational, and scholarly domains.
Download the Quality Portfolio Fillable Form
Use this Microsoft Word document to organize and record your QI work for use in your promotion packet.
- Plan-Study-Do-Act Cycles
- Quality Improvement Metrics & Measurements