Quality Improvement Practices

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Quality improvement practices refer to the effort in increasing practices process and to improve patient outcomes. Understanding the process of practices improvement is important in an organization. The most common recommendations related to improvements in the organization are tracking or follow-up of patients, in the process of patient care and minimize the waiting time. There are two primary aims of quality improvement practice which are improvements related to the process of care and improvements related to patients’ involvement in their care (Arar, Noel, Leykum, Zeber, Romero, & Parchman, 2011).
This writing will show how perceptions about opportunities and challenges in implementing the strategy of the improvement by focusing on issues …show more content…

The realization that focuses on patient's needs is one reason where hospitals and health systems are making the shift. However, healthcare organizations need to go beyond developing frontline staff with a breadth of knowledge to handle extensive requests. They also need depth in handling the particular patient type that typically makes such requests (Needham, 2012).
By focusing on these patient segments, organizations can shift attention from current care to patient's lifetime value. Keeping a patient's satisfaction and loyalty has obvious benefits. Unsatisfied patients are more than twice as likely as satisfied patients to share their experience with ten or more people (Needham, 2012). Considering all of this evidence, it shows that quality improvement has been a powerful tool to help make health care organization more effective in term of improving patient outcomes (McLaughlin & Houston, …show more content…

Hughes said there are some ways that can be used in quality improvement. According to Hughes, Quality improvement is defined “as systematic, data-guided activities designed to bring about an immediate improvement in health care delivery in particular settings” meanwhile a quality improvement strategy is defined as “any intervention aimed at reducing the quality gap for a group of patients representative of those encountered in routine practice. Some ways that can be used in quality improvement are a Plan-Do-Study-Act model, Six Sigma, Root cause analysis and Failure modes and effects analysis. Plan-Do-Study-Act is a method that has been widely used for improvement. The cyclical nature of impacting and assessing change is one of the unique features of this model. Six Sigma was reported to have been successfully used to decrease defects or variations and operating costs and improve outcomes in a variety of health care settings and for a variety of processes. Six Sigma was found to be a detailed process that clearly differentiated between the causes of variation and outcome process. The Root-cause analysis was reported to be useful to assess errors or incidents and differentiate between active and hidden errors, to identify need for changes to policies and procedures, and to serve as a basis to suggest

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