Health Care Quality Management

Book excerpt: In today’s challenging health care environment, health care organizations are faced with improving patient outcomes, redesigning business processes, and executing quality and risk management initiatives. Health Care Quality Management offers an introduction to the field and practice of quality management and reveals the best practices and strategies health care organizations can adopt to improve patient outcomes and program quality. Filled with illustrative case studies that show how business processes can be restructured to achieve improvements in quality, risk reduction, and other key business results and outcomes Clearly demonstrates how to effectively use process analysis tools to identify issues and causes, select corrective actions, and monitor implemented solutions Includes vital information on the use of statistical process control to monitor system performance (variables) and outcomes (attributes) Also contains multiple data sets that can be used to practice the skills and tools discussed and reviews examples of where and how the tools have been applied in health care Provides information on root cause analysis and failure mode effects analysis and offers, as discussion, the clinical tools and applications that are used to improve patient care By emphasizing the tools of statistics and information technology, this book teaches future health care professionals how to identify opportunities for quality improvement and use the tools to make those improvements.