Quality Improvement in Healthcare Nearly All Healthcare

Quality Improvement in Healthcare

Nearly all healthcare organizations today are aware of the Quality Improvement (QI) movement and seek to actively instill their businesses with such elements. In fact, the past few decades have shown the QI movement to be the main approach for healthcare organizations to measure performance and engage in lasting changes (Colton, 2000). The foundations of QI reside with its origins which come from multiple arenas: "in systems engineering, as a way of defining production processes; in quantitative analysis, as a methodological approach for collecting and analyzing data; and in organizational behavior, as a way of understanding how QI fits with an organization's structure and management philosophy" (Colton, 2000). QI fundamentally stands as a mode for a healthcare organization to better itself through enhancing the way in which it delivers service and by improving patient outcomes (Colton, 2000). "The U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality defines quality health care as 'doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, for the right person -- and having the best possible results'" (Varkey et al., 2007). While these tenets might seem vague, they actually contain fundamental values that allow them to be applied to a range of disciplines and needs within the healthcare arena. Quality first originated as a process and desirable element to be achieved in the industrial arena by Shewart in 1931: this process focused on customer needs and minimizing defects and eventually spread to a range of other professional arenas (Varkey et al., 2007).

Various stakeholders in professional healthcare define it differently as a result of the fact that they have widely different goals and needs in the field. Quality to a nurse leader is going to be very different to a hospital administrator. Quality to a neurosurgeon is going to be different as quality to a pediatrician. For instance, clinicians have a truly massive role when it comes to driving quality improvements. They are the people who are working directly with patients who can truly better care at the most immediate level -- however, in order to do so, they need to feel like they have strong alliances and lots of support. Patients need to take an active role in QI as well. Patients can do this by communicating better with their physicians and not censoring anything -- side effects they might be having, issues in their medical history, or additional vitamins and supplements that one takes (familydoctor.org). Keeping one's clinician well informed is an absolute way to prevent medical errors.

QI is needed so direly in the healthcare industry for a real variety of reasons. For example, the stakes are so high as the field deals with life and death continually and daily that there need to be measures in place to insure a dedication to quality. Furthermore, measurement of flaws and defects is a core component of QI, something essential for the healthcare arena. "A systematic measurement of quality demonstrates whether improvement efforts (1) lead to change in the primary end point in the desired direction, (2) contribute to unintended results in different parts of the system, and (3) require additional efforts to bring a process back into acceptable ranges" (Varkey, 2007). This kind of data can be gathered and analyzed and real changes to make lasting improvements can be put into effect right away.