5 Essential Components of Quality Improvement in HealthCare

Quality Improvement is one of the challenging and complex aspects for the healthcare industry that focusses on improving the patient experience since they need to align the industry changes with the different levels and processes of their organization. The best way to deal with such challenges is to leverage the established Quality Improvement approaches with improved technologies.

Quality improvement in healthcare is all about increasing efficiency, efficacy, and safety utilizing best-practices and methodologies. Hence, both qualitative and quantitative improvement has become critical in healthcare. The improvements will further lower the quality costs while allowing access to next-generation technology.

Impact of Quality Improvements on Healthcare Performance

Quality improvements have a direct relationship with healthcare performance. More and effective will be the quality improvements; higher will be the level of performance. The healthcare organizations that will continue with the traditional methods and approaches cannot expect any enhancements to the performance.

Quality improvements offer healthcare organizations an opportunity to replace inefficient systems and focus on more worthy things. For example – switching to digital records for patient health analysis. You can also use the software for record-keeping. For healthcare manufacturers, there are quality management software systems that allow them to manage product and process quality and mitigate quality issues by using standardization and industry best practices.

Benefits of Healthcare Quality Improvement

When we talk about healthcare quality improvements, we cannot ignore the following benefits:

• Enhanced visibility and readability of a patient’s health records.
• Store the medical history of the patient on a single platform using EHR.
• Generating better results.
• Reduced new healthcare initiatives time.
• Ensures expert consultation and analytics when required.

Hence, quality improvements in healthcare improve the quality of health services while keeping the costs minimum.

The objective of Quality Improvements in Healthcare

Quality improvements help healthcare organizations to achieve six main objectives including:

• Safety: Quality improvements, especially those led by technology, help healthcare organizations to provide the right healthcare to patients that can help them without any harm. But before upgrading to next-generation quality improvement approaches, they should be guided properly with the respective information to make efforts in the right direction.
• Effectiveness: The healthcare industry couldn’t afford risky improvements. They want services that can benefit them and the patients. They strictly refrain from the services that aren’t likely to be of any benefit or significant improvement in the care intended for people.
• Person-Centered Care: In healthcare, patient-centered care has changed to person-centric care. They need the advanced quality management systems that can help them serve individual preferences, coordinate and integrate care properly, inform and educate patients, physical comfort, emotional needs, involve family and friends, maintain continuity and smooth transition, and personalized access to care. This helps to align patient care with all clinical decisions.
• Timeliness: The appropriate quality improvements may help reduce the process delays, which sometimes become harmful for both the parties involved i.e. the one receiving the healthcare and the ones who are responsible to provide care.
• Efficiency: Efficiency in healthcare implies lesser waste – be it of equipment, medical supplies, ideas, and even energy. There is a need for quality improvements that can make processes efficient, keeping the product and efforts wastage to a minimum.
• Equitability: Healthcare should be provided without any biases on gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and geographical location. Quality improvements should be introduced keeping the same into consideration.

Now that you understood what objectives that the healthcare quality improvements help meeting, it’s not sensible to question the credibility of improvements.

5 Key Components of Quality Improvement Programs

Every successful quality improvement program is based on the five key components. They are:

• The problem,
• The goal,
• The aim,
• The measures, and
• The Analytics

The Problem

No successful quality improvement will ever start without having a problem to resolve. A deeper understanding of the issue will help you to choose the right quality improvement initiative, which can effectively resolve the problem it is targeting. However, you can list every other thing as a problem. Be sure to list the problems that are concerned with quality care for the patients.

The Goal

Identifying the goal that you want to achieve with quality improvement initiatives can be a challenging task for almost every healthcare institution. The reason is that every quality improvement has certain benefits associated that will be tempting at once. The right approach here will be that healthcare leaders perform a detailed analysis of target improvements concerning returns on investment and cost-effectiveness. There are certain questions that healthcare leader may ask their teams onboard to define the right quality improvement goals:

• Do the quality improvements align with the organizational improvement objectives? And, How?
• What are the biggest risks for patients with improvements?
• What volumes of variations the quality improvements could result in?
• How the entire improvement process will impact the cost-effectiveness?
• How will the effectiveness be measured for the improvements done?

There could be many more questions based on the objectives and stakeholders’ concerns with the significant quality improvements to decide the final goal to be met.

The Aim

Determining the aims for different processes will help healthcare institutions to manage the goal achievement work into multiple manageable blocks. Each block can be handled by different people. It will help to attain the goal in a lesser amount of time and costs.

The Measures

Whenever a quality improvement initiative is taken by healthcare institutions, there could be two scenarios – one with the results and one with the improvement. Understanding this difference is critical. You need to understand the baselines and actuals. This gives the healthcare systems a clarity when they are actually making improvements to the existing processes and when they are just intervening.

The Analytics

Analytics plays a key role in bringing out the clear insights in the highly confusing world of healthcare quality improvements. It allows easy assessment of care quality, care costs, patient experience, and most importantly the effectiveness of the improvements done so far. Right analytics help healthcare units to validate the measurements with smooth data sharing.

It won’t be wrong to conclude that quality improvements are powerful enough to transform healthcare and its functioning.

The Bottom Line

Though it’s not easy for healthcare institutions to cope and grow with the speed of quality improvements, it’s very critical for them to identify the right direction that can help them achieve the strategic improvement goals. The improvements help them become more manageable to achieve the desired outcome.

Since all the healthcare professionals have one aim to choose healthcare that they want to provide people the quality care. They truly are concerned about the improvements to every patient’s health and experiences. They even want to make it more affordable. But at the same time, it is important to keep the primary goal in mind. We all should make sure that every single quality improvement is aligned with the health improvement of people while reducing healthcare costs and improving the experience.

Therefore, choose the powerful quality management system like Qualityze eQMS Suite to attain the ultimate goal of quality improvements in healthcare in a streamlined, standardized, and compliant manner. Based on the most powerful and secure cloud platform i.e. Salesforce, Qualityze also ensures great flexibility, scalability, reliability, and safety.