Quality in Health Care: Theory, Application, and Evolution

The book contains black-and-white illustrations.

Here's a reference book that will explore the difficult issues facing quality management professionals, and energize your approach to concerns you face daily. Examine quality in healthcare from both a historical, and current perspective. You'll get proven strategies on how to survive in today's managed care environment. Explore the extensive framework of quality in healthcare and discover how it relates to other industries. Examine real life situations, explore the benefits, and the pitfalls to avoid. Plus, visualize the quality process with the help of charts and tables, and easy—to—understand diagrams.

William R. Hendee

This book examines the topic of quality in health care from the perspectives of how quality has been addressed in the past (principally through procedures of quality control and assurance), the present transition toward outcome measures, assessments of clinical effectiveness, and practice guidelines, and two concluding chapters on health care in the future. The book is a major new edition of the author's previous book on Quality Assurance in Hospitals (1982, 1990). The purpose is to examine healthcare quality from historical and current perspectives. Each of its three sections contains chapters written by well-known experts in healthcare quality. The editor's objective is to . . . encourage us all to gain an understanding of the underlying processes of our work. This is certainly a worthy objective, and the book meets it to the degree that the issue of healthcare quality is one of these processes. The editor has prepared this work . . . for students, practitioners, healthcare executives, quality improvement professionals, health planners, other professionals but, first and foremost, for individuals who are continuously learning and have the capacity for change. In other words, the book is intended for just about everyone working in healthcare, and just about anyone in the healthcare field can benefit from the book. The book is attractive, with sufficient line drawings, tables, and graphs to provide information succinctly and clearly. The table of contents is adequate to guide the reader through the chapters, and a detailed index helps pinpoint topics of specific interest. Three appendixes are included, and one on a case study of TQM in a community hospital isparticularly enlightening. The chapters are referenced to varying degrees; some provide a detailed map to additional reading, whereas others are cursory in the extreme. No one working in healthcare today can escape the growing insistence of payers and government agencies for the implementation of measures of accountability to ensure the quality and cost-effectiveness of the delivery of healthcare. In the past, healthcare quality has depended principally on front-end measures. Today the emphasis is shifting to back-end measures and the current understanding of these measures, and their role in protocols such as practice guidelines, benchmarking, and critical paths, is explained reliably in this book. The final two chapters on the future of healthcare are especially fascinating reading. This book is recommended for anyone interested in where the issue of healthcare quality is heading and how it has evolved to its present rather disorderly state.