ABSTRACT
Quality improvement (QI) in health care has been dened as “an interdisciplinary process to raise the likelihood of the delivery of best practices for preventive, diagnostic, therapeutic, and rehabilitative care to maintain, restore, or improve health outcomes of individuals and populations.”1 Continuous quality improvement (CQI) in health care can be described as an iterative approach to improving processes to reduce unexpected variation in health outcomes. CQI represents one model to achieve QI and has long been recognized as a key to success in the manufacturing industry with companies like Toyota leading the way. e role of QI and CQI has been less well adopted in the healthcare profession but is clearly increasing in prominence in this setting.2 A review of the number of articles cited on PubMed on October 19, 2012 with the search term “quality improvement” in the title or abstract yielded over 13,000 articles, with over 1,300 publications since January 1, 2012. Health care, and specically the care of chronic lung diseases like cystic brosis (CF), represents ideal settings for the application of QI and CQI.
