Quality Initiatives in the Health Care Industry

Quality Initiatives in the Health Care Industry

The Health Care industry has many opportunities to implement quality initiatives in order to improve items such as quality, productivity, wait times, and rising service costs. Health care organizations also have many occasions where they can potentially reduce the number of errors that occur; and in doing so they can save money and more importantly, human lives. With the ever-changing technology, improving the quality of care provided is an ongoing journey which never ceases in the health care industry. For this reason, it is important that health care providers continuously seek means of improving the quality of their services and understand the importance of quality initiatives.

The articles that I chose to review, focus on the quality initiatives of lean, six sigma, and ISO 9000. These articles discuss how quality initiatives can touch aspects of the healthcare system to assure high quality, cost effective health care.

The article on lean, titled “Lean Management in Hospitals--The Humboldt Way” focused on ways that the two hospitals in Humboldt County could utilize lean practices in order to improve their revenue. The article describes ways in which the two hospitals turned to the manufacturing industry to determine ways that they could improve process and eliminate waste in their own industry. They called this commitment to improvement, “The Humboldt Way”. The hospitals worked with a consultant, Simpler Healthcare, to determine areas in which they should focus this effort. They decided that there was a potential to increase revenue by more accurately identifying chargeable expenses in supplies that were used in medical, surgical, and implant procedures. As a result of implementing this quality initiative, the hospitals were able to capture more than $165,000 of added revenue in the following year, achieve almost $930,000 in net savings, and improve the communication between departments.

Similarly, the...