Quality Improvement Research Paper

Quality Improvement and Accreditation Cognizant of the fact that quality care is less expensive, for a number of years, healthcare organizations have looked for ways to improve quality and operational efficiency while cutting costs. Although American medicine is the best in the world, there are no doubt that there are also waste and inefficiencies in the system that have put health and resources at risk. Patients who stay longer than need in the hospital are exposed to infections. Vital informations are at times lost in transition from primary care doctors to specialists. These are some examples of inefficiencies that require quality improvement.

The Obama Care recognized and advocated for the need to improve the quality of health care for Americans. Defined as the “systematic and continuous actions that lead to measurable improvement in health care services and the health status of targeted patient group” , quality improvement requires the integrated undertaking of everyone – healthcare professionals,

Integral to a successful quality improvement is the integration of all the organization’s processes and procedures with its quality improvement efforts, identification and prioritization of potential areas for improvement using its patient population, practice operations or even established quality improvement measures as guide, data gathering and analysis to help understand how the its system works, set measurable goals, and monitor the effectiveness of change as well as communicating results. And because quality improvement is an on-going process, the organization must commit itself to ongoing evaluation and this is where accreditation might be used as a tool. Central to accreditation is a systematic quality improvement