From Incidents to Insights: A Roadmap for Using Data on Individual Professionalism Lapses to Guide Programming and Enhance Institutional Culture

While reporting and remediating unprofessional behavior is critical for patient safety and workplace collaboration, focusing on individual incidents may miss opportunities to promote professionalism at the institutional level. Here, we outline and demonstrate a five-step process for analyzing reports of unprofessional behavior at an academic medical center to inform future planning and quality improvement efforts. Drawing on our institutional experience, we detail how a structured approach (i.e. selection of a competency framework, collection and categorization of reported unprofessional behavior, data analysis, and creation of targeted programming based on identified themes) can convert individual incidents into opportunities to enhance institutional culture.