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The Emerging Imperative for Health Care Quality Improvement
Author(s) -
Kizer Kenneth W.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
academic emergency medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.221
H-Index - 124
eISSN - 1553-2712
pISSN - 1069-6563
DOI - 10.1197/aemj.9.11.1078
Subject(s) - medicine , operationalization , excellence , scrutiny , health care , quality (philosophy) , quality management , accountability , health care quality , work (physics) , nursing , public relations , operations management , law , management system , mechanical engineering , philosophy , epistemology , political science , economics , engineering
There are widespread and growing concerns about the variable and too often inadequate quality of health care in the United States. As a result, health care quality is being questioned and subjected to scrutiny as never before. Awareness of the quality deficits, combined with rising health care expenditures and changing attitudes of payers and consumers, has given rise to a nascent but growing quality improvement movement. Multiple barriers must be surmounted by this movement, but substantive work is under way on all fronts. Emergency medicine will definitely be affected by the quality improvement movement and should quickly move forward to define and establish performance measures for high‐quality emergency care in an era when chronic disease dominates the agenda. Emergency medicine should also aggressively work to operationalize a culture of quality to minimize medical errors, to practice evidence‐based medicine, to translate research results into clinical practice in a timely manner, and to establish accountability mechanisms for quality improvement and clinical excellence.