What is Quality Improvement (QI) in Healthcare?
Quality improvement (QI) is the framework used to systematically improve patient care. Most healthcare quality measures are classified as structural, process, or outcome. We must also remember to account for balancing measures (unintentional consequences that may result from a QI project). The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) categorizes measures as:
Quality measures in healthcare are constantly being created, refined, updated, and retired. As of March 2023, Battelle is now the conducting the next phase of work for CMS to endorse and maintain quality performance measures.
- Composite measure
- Cost/resource use measure
- Efficiency measure
- Intermediate outcome measure
- Outcome measure
- Patient-reported outcome-based performance measure (PRO-PM)
- Population health quality measure
- Process measure
- Structure measure
Quality measures in healthcare are constantly being created, refined, updated, and retired. As of March 2023, Battelle is now the conducting the next phase of work for CMS to endorse and maintain quality performance measures.
Six Domains of Healthcare Quality:
- Safe: Avoiding harm to patients from the care that is intended to help them.
- Effective: Providing services based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit and refraining from providing services to those not likely to benefit (avoiding underuse and misuse, respectively).
- Patient-centered: Providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.
- Timely: Reducing waits and sometimes harmful delays for both those who receive and those who give care.
- Efficient: Avoiding waste, including waste of equipment, supplies, ideas, and energy.
- Equitable: Providing care that does not vary in quality because of personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status.
How does QI fit into CME/CE?
QI projects can be integrated into larger CME/CE initiatives and engage interprofessional teams as they work to improve patient care. Since healthcare teams represent complex adaptive systems, interventions must be designed through the lens of systems thinking to ensure sustainable clinical impact.
CME = continuing medical education
CE= continuing education
QI = quality improvement
CME = continuing medical education
CE= continuing education
QI = quality improvement
Q Synthesis LLC
Advancing interprofessional collaborative practice by applying principles of systems thinking, implementation science, and health services research
Advancing interprofessional collaborative practice by applying principles of systems thinking, implementation science, and health services research
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Q Synthesis LLC
13 Summit Square Ctr #143 Langhorne, PA 19047 Phone: (215) 867-9122 Fax: (888) 409-9721 Email: [email protected] |
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