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Discussion 1
Importance of Quality-of-Care MeasurementQuality assurance through measurement helps healthcare organizations to gauge their performance and discover avenues of improvement. It enables the tracking of the patients’ results, ensuring the safety of the patients, minimizing the costs of healthcare, the development of evidence-based practice and the boosting of patients’ satisfaction (Carey et al. 2022). Healthcare managers use measurement to determine ways to make sound decisions, distribute resources appropriately, and perform interventions that improve general care delivery.Quality Measures and IndicatorsQuality measures refer to specific measures designed to evaluate various care quality components. They may be structural, process-oriented, and outcome-oriented (Nordenfelt, 2021). These include readmission ratios, infections, patient satisfaction scores, adherence to recommended therapies and healthcare-associated severe events.Methods of Quality MeasurementQuality of care is measured through, among others, administration data analysis, reviews of medical records, surveys of patients, and clinical audits. These indicators can be evaluated in terms of the single patients, the healthcare providers, or the organization itself (Salem, 2020). Quality is often quantified and compared for different healthcare settings using quantitative data like percentages, rates, and ratios.Tools and Frameworks for Quality ImprovementThere exist various tools and frameworks that can be used in ensuring quality improvements. Some of these include the PDSA cycle, Lean Six Sigma, and the IHI Model for Improvement (Salem, 2020). Healthcare managers are guided by these approaches to help them set up goals for improvements in care quality systematically and make changes based on evidence.
Application and Relevance to Health Services Management
In terms of health services management, quality of care measurement is an essential tool for measuring performance, strategic planning, resource allocation and making decisions. This helps managers identify any missing links in care delivery, distribute resources appropriately, and support continuous quality improvement (Nordenfelt, 2021). It is also important in ensuring organizational compliance with regulatory requirements as well as accreditation standards, which contribute to institutional credibility and accountability.
Therefore, quality of care measurement is critical for the administration of healthcare services. It assists healthcare service providers in evaluating their care delivery systems, including how effective they are, the extent of safety, and efficiency aspects of care.
Discussion 2Quality of care measurement and their application:
Quality at the most fundamental level is derived from clinicians making judgements about balancing benefit and harm to achieve desirable patient objectives (Donabedian 1980). A more comprehensive definition of quality would include such dimensions as access to care and patient satisfaction (Fleming 2021 pg.123). Quality measures are tools that help us measure or quantify healthcare processes, outcomes, patient perceptions, and organizational structure and/or systems that are associated with the ability to provide high-quality health care and/or that relate to one or more quality goals for health care. These goals include: effective, safe, efficient, patient-centered, equitable, and timely care (What are Quality Measures? 2023).
Safe: Avoiding harm to patients from the care that is intended to help them.
Effective: Providing services based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit and refraining from providing services to those not likely to benefit (avoiding underuse and misuse, respectively).
Patient-centered: Providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.
Timely: Reducing waits and sometimes harmful delays for both those who receive and those who give care.
Efficient: Avoiding waste, including waste of equipment, supplies, ideas, and energy.
Equitable: Providing care that does not vary in quality because of personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status. (Six Domains Six Domains of Healthcare Quality 2022)
Relevance to health services management:
Quality of care measurement relates to health services management by Donabedian stated that the possibility of quality of healthcare improvement depended on both the technical and interpersonal quality of healthcare services. Technical care is about the medical treatment aspects of patient care, while interpersonal care is about communicating with the patient about his or her treatment. It is generally agreed that the quality of healthcare services should be measured using the viewpoints of main stakeholders such as users, healthcare providers, payers for the services, politicians and managers of health and against explicit criteria reflecting the values of a given society (Endeshaw 2020).
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