Two Barriers to Hospital Quality Improvement and How to Overcome Them
Hospitals today face more pressure than ever to improve the quality of care they provide. The rising number of medical errors—now a leading cause of death and injury in the United States1—and a growing reliance on performance measures for hospital accreditation and reimbursement have pushed quality to the top of the health care agenda. This shift was triggered in part by the Institute of Medicine's 2000 publication, “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” which found that over half the adverse events in the health care field arise from preventable errors.2 Preventing those errors, the IOM concluded, would require hospitals to systematically design safety into processes of care. Read More...
Compartmentalized Department Structure
Hospitals are exceedingly complex, housing up to 50 specialties and subspecialties. Many operate as a collection of balkanized departments, each with their own cultures and loyalties. When retrieving data from various departments, quality administrators typically find themselves swamped with data in incompatible formats, including some in paper form. “We’re data-rich but information-poor,” says Debbie McQuay, director of quality improvement at Citizens Memorial Hospital, an IHM member in Bolivar, MO. “There’s so much data coming at you that it’s hard to know what you need to analyze first.” Read More...