Quality management in health care ensures that patients receive an excellent provision of care. Health care organizations such as medical clinics and hospitals are responsible for performing this function to show their due diligence to taking optimal care of their patients. By employing quality management applications to a health care business, doctors and administrators can benefit from identifying ways to improve internal processes that will ream more “quality” outcomes for their patients.

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Quality management in nursing and health care focuses on providing excellent care to patients and ensuring that health care professionals follow the right processes and guiding principals to reduce the risk of harm.

Quality Management in Health Care Principles

Most health care organizations establish standards, or guiding principles, that flush out their service expectations. For instance, a guiding principle may be the expectation that patients shall not wait more than 24 hours to get a phone call returned by their doctor.

Quality management plays a big role in establishing guiding principles. The health care field is full of legal regulations such as HIPAA, a confidentiality law, so quality management departments are responsible for identifying which statutes apply to their organization and developing guiding principles for their company to adhere to.

Compliance Monitoring and Auditing

One major function of quality management in nursing and health care is monitoring compliance. Compliance is monitored as part of the quality management’s assurance that processes are being followed and patients are receiving optimal care. There are different ways to monitor compliance; the most popular method being quality audits.

Audits are the act of checking documentation against standards, reviewing data and scoring the outcomes. Audits use a quantitative approach to measure statistics that are captured and put into a compliance report.

Risk Management and Mitigation

Quality management in health care helps manage, minimize and mitigate risks. Risk management is an integral part of keeping patients safe and ensuring that the care they receive does not threaten their health or safety.

In the health care world, prescription medication has the potential to be a risk management issue. Patient allergic reactions, adverse affects and even fatalities can be the result of too many medications, not enough medications or a hazardous combination of medications.

Quality management efforts can help keep patients safe and reduce their exposure to health threats by regularly monitoring things like how many medications a patient is taking.

Health Care Process Improvement

Health care organizations benefit from quality management functions because areas of weakness are identified through compliance audits. Knowing where organizations have the potential to improve is important for companies to ensure their viability. Weaknesses hinder success and growth, so administrators can use their findings to work on quality improvement in health care to bring the company up to par.

Need for Technical Assistance

When errors or weaknesses are found during audits or observations, the quality management team will work with the particular employee or entire department to make things right. Technical assistance training may be provided so that employees can gain an educational background on the compliance areas, as well as ask questions to the quality management staff.