Health professions education is in constant pursuit of new ways of
teaching and assessment in order to improve the training of healthcare
professionals. Educators are often challenged with designing,
implementing, and evaluating programs in the context of their
professional practice, particularly those in response to dynamic and
emerging social needs. This article explores the synergies and
intersections of two approaches -- quality improvement and program
evaluation -- and the potential utility of their combinations within our
field to design, evaluate, and most importantly, improve educational
programming. We argue that the inclusion of established quality
improvement frameworks within program evaluation provides a proven
mechanism for driving change, can optimize programming within the
multi-contextual education systems, and, ultimately, that these two
approaches are complementary to one another. These combinations hold
great promise for optimizing programming in alignment with social
missions, where it has been difficult for institutions worldwide to
generate and capture evidence of social accountability.