Applying Quality-Assurance Methods

A Report on the National Demonstration Project on Quality Improvement in Health Care

This book is recommAnded for managers wanting to enhance service quality and productivity. By avoiding mistakes and useless units of activity, gains in productivity occur as quality improves.
--Healthcare Financial Management

Learn how health care organizations can use the quality improvement process to help regain control and hope in a time of frustration and skyrocketing costs. In ten key lessons, the authors demonstrate what works and does not work in actual practice. They present case examples of specific health care improvement projects ranging from transport of critically ill infants to quick turnaround of emergency lab specimens and to the generation of accurate Medicare bills.

Donald M. Berwick is president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and clinical professor of pediatrics and health care policy, Harvard Medical School. He is also an associate in pediatrics at Boston's Children's Hospital and a consultant in pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital.

A. Blanton Godfrey is dean and Joseph D. Moore Professor, College of Textiles, North Carolina State University. He is the former chairman and CEO of the Juran Institute and the coeditor (with Joseph M. Juran) of Juran's Quality Handbook, Fifth Edition and the coauthor of Modern Methods for Quality Control and Improvement, Second Edition.

Jane Roessner is a writer for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement