The Health Care Manager's Guide to Continuous Quality Improvement

Book excerpt: Designed for department directors, physician chiefs, product and service line managers, improvement team leaders and facilitators, administrators, and trainers, this book is a practical guide to managing for continuous improvement in clinical and service processes. Part I lays out the concept of continuous quality improvement, the customer-driven management model and an exploration of the manager's role in quality improvement. Part II explores customer-driven management and process improvement--two models that build data-driven self-correction into daily management routines. Part III presents an in-depth discussion of the most useful and user-friendly tools of process improvement--tools that make processes, root causes of problems, decisions and plans visible and therefore easy discuss and reengineer. Part IV addresses typical concerns managers identify in their pursuit of quality improvement.