ABSTRACT
Quality Improvement (QI) has become part of the health care lexicon. It is part of licensing require ments, a focus of organizational committees, and is seen as a component of health care delivery by pay ers, regulators, and administrators. Yet, the quality improvement discipline in the health care industry is underdeveloped and inadequate. It is rather ironic that a field focused on making people “better” is ill equipped to make itself “better” (Blumenthal & Kilo, 2000; Solberg et. al., 2000). Health care delivery costs continue to increase; errors are common and result in 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year; and the United States compares poorly to most Western countries in benchmark public health measures like infant mortality rates and death rates for coronary heart disease (Institute of Medicine, 2000; World Health Organization, 2003.)
For each of these shortcomings, examples exist within and outside of health care that the health care system can do better. Policymakers and admin istrators are aware of the gap between current and potential performance. The inability to make qual ity improvements suppresses attainment of supe rior efficiency, effectiveness, and clinical outcomes, and is viewed as one of health care’s greatest chal lenges (IOM, 2000).
