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Health Care Quality Improvement and the Ambiguous Commodity of Care
Author(s) -
Manelin Ethan Balgley
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
medical anthropology quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.855
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1548-1387
pISSN - 0745-5194
DOI - 10.1111/maq.12608
Subject(s) - health care , quality (philosophy) , commodity , ambiguity , public relations , business , humanism , nursing , psychology , sociology , political science , medicine , law , computer science , finance , philosophy , epistemology , programming language
Quality of care has become a major concern of the U.S.’s health care system in recent decades thanks to an energetic social movement and, more recently, interest from health insurers. Ethnographic research at a primary care clinic engaged in an array of quality improvement efforts revealed that physicians navigate two incommensurable views of quality: one aligned with the metric‐oriented quality movement, and the other based on a humanistic vision of their professional role. Against the backdrop of a financialized health care system, these two views represent “differentiated ties” with respect to health care as a commodity. Furthermore, they are used to justify a broad division of labor where support staff and clinic leaders relieve physicians of responsibility for managing, implementing, and reporting quality efforts. These differentiated ties reveal the fundamental ambiguity of health care as a commodity, the resolution of which is a central—albeit implicit—motive of the quality movement.

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