The IRO and Quality Management

IROs are expected to have advanced quality management system much like you'd find in any other organization, which is responsible for delivering a consistent level of high quality to its customers. If you've been in the manufacturing world you've heard of Total Quality Management. The kinds of principles that we've heard and read about for many years in other circles are certainly applying in today's healthcare system. Rendering a consistent evidence based decision is absolutely critical for an IRO as it relates to making sure that it's upholding its two most important goals: maintaining the highest level of quality and patient safety.

Our quality management systems include a number of different types of URAC oriented initiatives. First of all, we track all of our quality data and review it on a regular basis. Second, we have a number of specific measurements and metrics that we use in order to measure how well we're doing as an organization. We track everything from error rate to customer complaints to interior reliability. These are just some of the measurements which are used to ensure make sure that we are consistently delivering quality to our payer and medical management clients.

Quality management systems inside an IRO looks, acts, and behaves very much like a quality management operation in any modern company with an emphasis towards quality assurance. Quality assurance of course relates to taking preventative measures through training, systems development, incentives to employees, and other techniques to make sure that a consistent quality product is always delivered.

Quality control, on the other hand, means checking and catching any errors after they've happened. A good IRO is going to focus on insuring quality by building those upstream systems and processes so that they can prevent those errors from happening in the first place.

Today's IRO has a high degree of accountability to it's clients for quality management and some of the systems and processes that I've mentioned here certainly are things that you should look for if you're thinking about selecting an IRO.

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