Quality Improvement In Healthcare

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There is one established goal amongst health care professionals and that is to provide their patients with a high level of quality healthcare. Health care quality is the degree to which health services, for individuals and populations, increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current medical knowledge. Quality improvement is mostly process management. Since health care is a complex system, we would need to target different processes at a time.
”Meaningful quality improvement must be data driven” (Deming). This data needs to be not only timely but also delivered within the right context. Managed care means managing the actual processes of care as opposed to just instructing the physicians, nurses and other
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This can be done in four different ways; firstly, by self-regulation among professionals. Each individual needs to have an inert amount of willingness to change, to provide their patients with the quality of health care that they deserve. Secondly the organization can exert external control and put in place various incentives. For example, they can praise employees for outstanding work such as “employee of the month” status as well as penalize employees when they fail to deliver the standard of care that is expected of them. Thirdly, quality can be improved by patient power and market forces. The most powerful force that affects any change in policy, is the lay-people of whom it affects. When there is a population crisis those in charge will have no choice but to implement policies that go beyond the status quo. If patients/customer protest that they are not receiving quality healthcare, the heads of organizations will be forced to ensure that employees do so in order not for that organization not to crumble. Last but not least organizations can ensure that the amount of variation and waste are …show more content…
It is a foundation for health care managers. It involves the process of measuring performance and responding in such a way to ensure that a set standard is met. The process of controlling comprises of four main steps. The first step is establishing objectives and standards; this is set through planning. The objectives provide the performance targets, and the standards provide the gauge for assessing actual accomplishments. There are two types of standards; output and input standards. Output standards measure results in terms of performance quantity, quality, cost or time. Input standards measure effort in terms of amount of work used during task performance. It is used where outputs are difficult or expensive to measure. The second step is measuring the actual performance. The measurement must be specific enough to identify major differences between what is actually happening versus what was initially