Monitoring the Quality of Health Care: Issues and Scientific Approaches

by Thomas T.H. Wan, Alastair M. Connell

Overview

As the public in the U.S. has grown increasingly concerned over the gaps in the health care system's attention to quality, and as the health care industry itself struggles for stability in a volatile environment, a historic opportunity presents itself. This book reviews a variety of quality monitoring approaches, identifies critical issues pertaining to assessment, measurement, implementation, and evaluation of quality initiatives, and suggests scientific approaches to put in place a core set of performance measures that reliably identify the value-added clinical and managerial behaviors in health care - for both quality and cost efficiency.

The key to quality improvement has to focus on physicians and other health professionals. This book is designed to identify issues pertaining to health care quality and to formulate appropriate approaches for improving quality. It can be used by risk managers and hospital executives to guide their development, implementation, and evaluation of quality improvement programs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781402071003
Publisher:	Springer US
Publication date:	09/30/2002
Edition description:	2003
Pages:	309
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.36(d)

Table of Contents

I: Issues.- 1 Health Care: An Industry in Transition.- 2 The Historical Roots of Health Care Oversight: Cost Containment.- 3 Basic Definitions and Criteria for the Management and Assurance of Quality in Health Care.- 4 Complexities that Health Care Oversight Must Take into Account.- 5 The Necessity for Multifaceted Quality Management.- 6 Quality Improvement: Professional Initiatives.- 7 Quality Oversight in Health Care Institutions: Monitors and Checklists.- 8 Quality Oversight: Use of Administrative Data Bases.- 9 Quality Oversight: Medical Record Review.- 10 Quality Oversight: Patient Satisfaction Surveys.- 11 Quality Accountability: External Oversight.- 12 Total Quality Management and Continuous Quality Improvement.- 13 Approaches to Valid Quality Assistance.- II: Scientific Approaches.- 14 Measuring the Quality of Hospital Care: the Importance of Identifying Principal Risk Factors for Adverse Health Events and Using Risk Adjustment in Measures of Quality.- 15 Assessing a Quality Improvement Program: Study Design, Causal Specification and Analysis.- 16 Identifying the Roots Causes or Patterns of Adverse Health Events: Statistical Methods.- 17 Conclusion: What Must Be Done.