Six Aims for Quality Improvement

From "Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century" released in March 2001:

Six Aims for Improvement:

• Safe: avoiding injuries 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. 
• 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.  

A health care system that achieves major gains in these six areas would be far better at meeting patient needs. Patients would experience care that is safer, more reliable, more responsive to their needs, more integrated, and more available, and they could count on receiving the full array of preventive, acute, and chronic services that are likely to prove beneficial. Clinicians and other health workers also would benefit through their increased satisfaction at being better able to do their jobs and thereby bring improved health, greater longevity, less pain and suffering, and increased personal productivity to those who receive their care. 

​https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222265/