Healthcare organizations are responsible for using quality management to provide the best possible care to patients. Quality management activities, when effectively applied in a healthcare setting, allow professionals to identify ways to improve services and efforts that will ensure better outcomes for patients.
The main areas to explore are quality assurance, quality improvement, and population health:
- Quality assurance is the monitoring and evaluating of services, facilities, and projects to ensure compliance against certain regulations and standards. Quality assurance is an ongoing planned review of a facility involving quality control and the output of their processes. Healthcare managers will carry out these periodic reviews and are commonly directed by government regulations, accrediting standards, and payer requirements.
- Healthcare managers must identify priority areas of focus in quality assurance activities. Developing strategies, collecting and analyzing data, encouraging preventative care, and setting goals are a few matters to consider. There is an importance to incorporating programs with multiple departments and encouraging teamwork throughout the organization. Successful execution of quality assurance activities requires a working knowledge of the facility licensing rules and regulations, healthcare laws, and healthcare operations best practices.
- Quality improvement refers to efforts to increase efficiency, effectiveness, performance, accountability, and outcomes in healthcare services. These efforts are set in place to bring about fairness and improve the overall health of individuals. Staff at all levels will implement such care to create constant improvement by participating in examining workplace problems in-depth to find the root causes.
- Since quality improvement is an ongoing management process, continuous quality improvement (CQI) should be implemented. CQI is the process of encouraging all healthcare employees to endlessly be finding ways to improve performance, environment, and quality and safety of patient care. CQI is not about quick fixes and truly has no end to the process. Some of the main focuses are to reduce material waste and lower costs, while minimizing patient treatment errors that result in frequent or reoccurring visits to providers. These strategies are designed with individual patients in mind but work well for whole populations or communities.
- Population health is where quality management focuses on improving healthcare for a group of individuals, or an entire population of patients. Population health pays attention to the current health and any factors of the people in that population. Steps will then be taken to address any necessary interventions, policies, or improvements needed within the population’s health care system. Researching and assessing such things as disease and injury prevention, environmental and physical health, and the quality of current healthcare resources for said population are vital to our global health economy.
- One of the best examples of the continuum of quality management is chronic disease management in a primary care clinic, such as a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC). FQHC’s are required by law to ensure quality assurance activities occur, that quality improvement activities happen to improve any outcomes that could be improved, and data is tracked and reported on a population health basis. Through the continuous tracking of Universal Data Set (UDS) measures, providers can identify when patient chronic disease outcomes improve over time or not. As this data is tracked, if the data is not meeting expectations (quality assurance), then the organizations will engage in activities to improve the outcomes of the population (quality improvement).
All aspects of quality management keep healthcare employees current and responsive to changes within a healthcare organization and the greater healthcare industry. Knowing how to be responsive and adaptable is an important part of any healthcare system. These techniques are designed to help resources remain useful, prevent the spread of diseases, and educate people on the importance of self-care. More importantly, quality management demands improvement for the safety, health, and excellence in a healthcare setting.