healthcare

We have spent a lot of time this semester talking about various aspects of the health care industry -- cost, access, utilization, strategy.  Another important aspect that needs to be balanced with all these other concerns is QUALITY! What does QUALITY mean in health care? How do you go about defining quality in health care?  Is there just one measure of quality, or more?! Find one outside article that addresses health care quality. Tell us about the article and how they define quality.

Be sure to post your citations

Alicia Aliendre COLLAPSE

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In the health care industry quality of care means everyone participating in ways to improve health care such as health care professionals, patients and their families, researchers, payers, planners and educators.  These changes lead to better outcomes in health, a better system performance in care, as well as better professional development.

 When you describe quality, it’s the process for making strategic choices in health systems for quality assurance in health care and decision making. Although there are many outcomes to improve quality of care, the main concern is accomplishing a goal that will be beneficial for the future.

Good quality means providing patients with appropriate services in a technically competent manner, with good communication, shared decision making, and cultural sensitivity. In practical terms, poor quality can mean too much care (e.g., providing unnecessary tests, medications, and procedures, with associated risks and side effects), too little care (e.g., not providing an indicated diagnostic test or a lifesaving surgical procedure), or the wrong care (e.g., prescribing medicines that should not be given together, using poor surgical technique).

Quality can be evaluated based on structure, process, and outcomes ( Donabedian 1980 ). Structural quality evaluates health system characteristics, process quality assesses interactions between clinicians and patients, and outcomes offer evidence about changes in patients' health status. All three dimensions can provide valuable information for measuring quality, but the published quality-of-care literature reveals that there is more experience with measuring processes of care.

Marie Savino 

To many health care consumers quality of health care can mean several different things, including wait times, doctors professionalism, the courtesy of the medical staff and use of updated medical technology, which can all effect how people judge the quality of health care they are receiving.  These characteristics may be important to the patient but they do not add up to a quality health care system.  Quality health care can be defined as levels of superiority which distinguish the health care provided based on accepted standards of quality.  Several factors help measure quality of care:

* Safety- health care does not cause harm

* Effective- health care service is based on scientific and medical knowledge and is right for the illness

* Time- health care is given without prolonged wait time and harmful delays are avoided

* Fairness- health care is not affected based on sex, age, language or race

* Respect- health care is provided respectfully to a patient /individual needs are met/assurance that all information is relayed and understood

There are many scientific tools used by health care professionals to measure health care quality.  Very specific date is collected and studied over periods of time.  Quality of care used by health care professionals can be reviewed and improved by certain measures such as data from a patients record.  To display how accurately a provider's care is, an operational process is used to convert information into a rate, percentage or time.  Information retrieved from quality measures will show how well most providers care for their patients but not all of them. 

Many private and public organizations are working towards improving overall health care quality measures.  Making these measures more dependable, consistent and beneficial to people in making health care choices is the main goal.