Continuous Improvement in Hospital Quality of Care

Hospitals like any other business are under continuous pressure to improve their quality of care, and focus on improving outcomes and overall patient safety. Most hospital organizations today have adopted quality management best practices to ensure that services for their patients are uniform, consistent and meet the highest quality standards possible.

We work with many of the largest hospital chains across the country and see their dedication and commitment to continuously improve quality. Patients of the heath care system should be pleased to know that most hospitals are in fact working very hard to evolve and improve their quality standards.

There are however exceptions. Some hospitals have nagging problems related to specific sentinel events and negative outcomes. Often what we find is that there's a correlation between high incidence of bad outcomes and a poor quality management process. Sometimes times the missing ingredient in a quality management system is leadership. When a hospital or medical provider is consistently suffering from a high number of sentinel events, typically it is because there is a lack of quality management accountability inside their system and a lack of follow-through on corrective or disciplinary action which is necessary in order to ensure the highest standards.

How can this be resolved? The starting point is for the leaders in these problem hospitals that are suffering from this problem to take notice and engage the necessary resources in order to create real, lasting change. The leaders can set up and commit to making changes and go through a change management process.

Certainly an Independent Review Organization can be brought in to help overcome any conflict of interest or other issues related to protection of certain physicians who are misbehaving or underperforming. The role of an Independent Review Organization in exposing misdiagnosis, mistreatments or a physician’s underperformance can be a very important one. The reason is because an Independent Review Organization can provide an objective, unbiased, decision making that helps hospitals clearly understand when they have underperforming physicians instead of making these decisions based hearsay, personal grudges, insinuations or guess work.

The Independent Review Organization plays a vital role in taking the guesswork out of making sure that physicians are held accountable and exonerated when they have done nothing wrong.