Charting has always been at the heart of improvement work in Life QI - helping teams understand variation, track progress over time, and measure the...
Over the last ten years, healthcare organisations around the world have used Life QI to support and scale improvement work - helping teams collaborate, measure improvement, and deliver meaningful change.
During that time, the world of healthcare improvement has continued to evolve. Organisations are now tackling broader and more complex challenges, improvement approaches have expanded beyond traditional quality improvement programmes, and expectations around collaboration, insight, flexibility, and digital capability have rapidly increased.
At the same time, one thing has remained constant: the invaluable feedback, ideas, and experiences shared by our customer community. Those conversations have played a central role in shaping what comes next.
Today, we’re excited to introduce Simana - the next-generation replacement for Life QI.
Simana has been completely rebuilt from the ground up to meet the evolving needs of modern healthcare improvement. While it builds on the foundations and learning of Life QI, it represents a major step forward in capability, flexibility, and user experience.
Designed for a broader range of improvement activities - from continuous improvement and transformation programmes to audits, idea management, and improvement planning - Simana enables organisations to run improvement work in ways that reflect their own language, structures, and methodologies.
Importantly, Simana has also been built for the AI era.
As artificial intelligence increasingly becomes part of everyday working life, healthcare organisations need platforms that are ready to harness its potential safely, practically, and meaningfully. Simana has been designed with this future in mind; creating the foundations for smarter workflows, enhanced insights, reduced administrative burden, and better support for frontline teams leading change.
Below, we’ve outlined some of the major enhancements, new capabilities, and key differences you can expect in Simana, along with links to more detailed articles exploring specific areas in greater depth.
- Upgraded tools
- New tools
- More intuitive project layout
- Run more than just QI projects
- Flexible templates and workflows
- AI-powered improvement
Upgraded tools
All of Life QI’s improvement tools have been upgraded…
SPC charts have been completely rebuilt based on user feedback. The new charts are easier to create, add data and configure to look just the way you want them (e.g. pick the colour of the lines, change the font size on the axis). Plus, we have introduced goals, on-chart annotations, ghosting and new forms of aggregation. Read more about the charting updates.
The new Driver Diagram comes with a fresh new look, fits more on the screen, and all the text formatting options you could want to produce clear impactful diagrams. Combine this with the updated export feature and you will be sharing your diagrams far and wide!
The powerhouse of improvement, the PDSA cycle, has been re-worked into a new layout, allowing you to see the full PDSA in one go. Plus, we have introduced the Adopt/Adapt/Abandon field to record and report on the outcome of your PDSA cycles.
New tools
The improvement toolset has been massively expanded! All the new tools are fully integrated interactive tools, so no searching for offline templates or uploading files, just all the tools you need that are easy to use and at your fingertips.
Simana comes with all these new tools:
- Pareto chart
- Fishbone diagram
- 5 Whys
- Bar charts
- Line charts
- Pie charts
- Histogram
- Scatterplot
- SIPOC
- Kanban
- System of profound knowledge
- The 4 Ps
Plus, there is more in the pipeline! Watch this space for Process Maps…
More intuitive project layout
We’ve reimagined the way improvement projects are structured and presented. Rather than navigating between multiple tabbed pages, projects are now brought together into a single interactive workspace inspired by the familiar A3 improvement format. Each section of the project is displayed as an expandable tile within one central project board, creating a more visual, engaging, and intuitive experience.
This approach makes it easier for teams to understand the full story of a project at a glance, quickly move between different areas of work, and present improvement activity in a format that more closely reflects how improvement work is shared and communicated in practice.
Run more than just QI projects
Projects have always been the heart of Life QI, along with Programmes. But we have increasingly been to provide a home of all of an organisation’s improvement workflows. From capturing ideas from staff, to running quick win projects, to major programmes, to audits, to improvement plans. The list is ever expanding. And it doesn’t make it easy for frontline staff if all of these workflows are in different systems.
So now they are all in one place – Simana! One easy to use workspace for all your improvement work.
Pick from best practice templates including:
- Ideas
- Quick wins
- Projects
- Programmes
- Audits
- Plans
- Huddles
- OKRs
Or design your own to match your governance and process.
Flexible templates and workflows
Simana introduces a much more flexible approach to improvement workflows and tools giving organisations the choice to adopt proven best-practice templates or tailor experiences to meet their own ways of working.
We know that improvement approaches vary across organisations, teams, and programmes. To support this, Simana significantly expands the flexibility previously available in Life QI.
Customers on the Professional subscription plan will be able to create and customise their own workflows, tools, and templates to align with local methodologies, governance processes, and operational needs.
Customers on the Standard subscription plan will have access to a wide range of expertly designed templates and workflows out of the box - providing ready-to-use workflows that will meet the needs of many improvement teams and programmes.
AI-powered improvement
Simana has been designed for the AI era - not by adding AI for the sake of it, but by embedding intelligent assistance directly into the workflows teams use every day.
Unlike generic AI tools, Simana AI is purpose-built for healthcare improvement. It understands the structure of improvement projects, the methods teams use, and the challenges involved in delivering sustainable change. Whether you are planning a project, analysing data, running PDSA cycles, or reviewing progress, Simana AI acts as an always-available digital improvement assistant, helping teams work more effectively while reducing administrative burden.
Simana AI can support teams in a wide range of practical ways, including:
Providing proactive insights
Detecting patterns, shifts, or anomalies in data and suggesting appropriate actions — for example identifying a non-random variation in a chart and offering to recalculate the centre line.
Reducing manual administration
Automatically transforming uploaded spreadsheets into charts, summarising meeting notes into project updates, or helping draft documentation and action plans.
Supporting improvement methodology
Helping teams generate driver diagram ideas, suggest potential PDSA cycles, identify possible measures, or refine aim statements based on the project context.
Improving project quality and consistency
Highlighting incomplete sections, suggesting areas requiring further detail, and helping teams maintain well-structured, high-quality improvement records.
Making knowledge more accessible
Allowing users to ask natural-language questions about their projects, data, or improvement activity and receive instant, context-aware support.
Rather than replacing improvement expertise, Simana AI is designed to enhance it - helping teams spend less time on administration and more time delivering meaningful improvement.
Further details on Simana AI to follow shortly!
This Is Just the Beginning
Simana represents the biggest evolution of our platform since Life QI was first launched. Built in partnership with our customer community, designed for the realities of modern healthcare improvement, and ready for the opportunities of the AI era, Simana is intended to help organisations deliver improvement work in ways that are more connected, flexible, intelligent, and impactful.
And there is much more to come.
Throughout this article, we’ve linked to feature previews and deeper dives into specific areas of functionality - so be sure to explore those to see many of the new capabilities in more detail. We’ll also be sharing further feature reveals, updates, screenshots, and videos on the blog over the coming months as we continue towards launch.
We’re incredibly excited about what Simana will enable for healthcare improvers everywhere: less administrative burden, better collaboration, greater visibility of improvement work, and more time focused on delivering meaningful change for patients, staff, and services.
