Ten Quality Improvement Initiatives to Standardize Healthcare Processes

Abstract

Quality improvement is a continuous journey to standardize healthcare processes and structure to reduce variation, achieve predictable results, and improve outcomes for patients, healthcare systems, and organizations. Improving quality is about making health care safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable. It’s about giving the people closest to problems affecting care quality the time, permission, skills, and resources they need to solve them. Patient safety it’s a fundamental principle of excellent patient care. On the other hand, patient safety it’s a fundamental principle of excellent patient care. Patient safety also is one of the key components of the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) six domains of healthcare quality (Safe, Timely, Effective, Efficient, Equitable, and Patient-centered) that is used as a metric to evaluate how safe is the practice. This work aims to highlight the main quality improvement initiatives, and tools used to standardize healthcare processes and improve patient safety.