Quality and Performance Improvement Approaches in Healthcare Organizations

The AHRQ Clinical Guidelines are no longer available due to funding. Please go to the following website at the National Centers for Complementary and Integrative Health and review a guideline of a disease commonly seen in your practice area. Provide an overview of the recommendations in this guideline. Include in your discussion how your practice follows this guideline.

https://nccih.nih.gov/health/providers/clinicalpractice.htm

peer reviewed articles within 5 years

Module will highlight quality and performance improvement approaches in healthcare organizations along with ways to build a culture of quality and safety.

Continuous quality improvement (CQI) is a global strategy for improving health care in various settings. CQI is defined as a structural organizational process for involving personnel in planning and executing a continuous flow of improvements to provide quality health care that meets or exceeds expectations (Denisco & Burke, 2016). Essential for successful CQI in healthcare are leadership and teamwork. Although CQI has been widely used there has been a lack of documentation of progress in improving quality of health care and a reduction of harm to patients (Denisco & Burke, 2016).

  In 1999 the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, in hopes of developing a comprehensive strategy to reduce preventable medical errors. Although advances have been made there is room for much more improvement since numerous patients continue to suffer from preventable medical errors. No longer do we look just at the hospitals when studying medical errors; we must include various other agencies within the healthcare arena. It is essential that we keep patients safe but agreeing on how to do this is the issue. There are many stakeholders involved all with their own proposed solutions. Despite the barriers of the patient safety movement much progress has been made. Central issues and system-level weaknesses have been identified and various sectors of the healthcare industry now have a better understanding of the critical role they play in improving patient safety.