Quality Improvement in Healthcare In today's healthcare industry, many facilities search for ways to obtain an advantage from other facilities in the market. One way to obtain an advantage over other facilities is to have a reputation of providing the highest quality of care to the patients. Maintaining and continuously striving to improve the quality of various processes and procedures within the facility is important. Foundation frameworks, stakeholder differences, roles of clinicians and patients, need for quality management, areas to monitor, regulatory agencies, and resources represent the various points that will be addressed throughout the paper.
Foundational Frameworks of QI There are several foundational frameworks within the subject of QI. There are several QI models derived from ideas and theories of leaders. According to Ransom, Joshi, Nash, and Ransom, (2008) PDSA/PDCA, API, FOCUS PDCA, Baldrige Criteria, ISO 9000, Lean, and Six Sigma represent various frameworks used to improve the quality of healthcare. Edward Deming described the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle a plan to learn and improve the quality of work dated back to 1950s. Later Walter Shewhart developed the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle for the basis for planning and expressing QI endeavors. The PDSA/PDCA model helps the facility to focus on how to plan for the improvement, how the improvement will be implemented, how the improvement will be identified/monitored, and what was learned from the improvement process. The associates in process improvement (API) represent a model based upon the PDSA cycle. In addition to the PDSA cycle the model adds three fundamental questions: what are we trying to improve, how will we identify the change is an improvement, and what change can we make that will result in improvement according to Ransom et al. (2008). The FOCUS PDCA represents another