Addressing Variation in Hospital Quality: Is Six Sigma the Answer?

Six Sigma and Hospital Quality
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Six Sigma and Hospital Quality
Introduction
The main aim of healthcare is to provide quality care to the people. Various hospitals and health systems around the globe continue to provide care that has varying quality. People appreciate quality services, and that is what makes them returning customers. In addition to that, people feel satisfied and happy. However, with time, health care has deteriorated leading to the dissatisfaction of the customers. This poses a challenge to administrators since they have the role to improve the quality of care provided in their organizations. Using quality management models can be one of the best approaches used to improve quality. There has been the invention of Six Sigma to help solve the above problem. Six Sigma is a program that uses data analysis to come up with free processes and also decrease variation. This program can offer solutions to the issues faced by management by providing a long lasting solution to quality improvement.
In a nutshell, Six Sigma can be defined as a quality program that aims at improving the customer’s medical experience as it lowers the associated medical and clinical costs, and further aims at building better leaders in the medical branch to enhance the quality of medical treatment. However, every company that wants to adopt Six Sigma must have the employees undergo training first. This is to help the employees apply the methodology concerning the business. Sadly, the training is expensive and not all the companies can afford the training costs. Small businesses are the most affected since they do not have enough capital to run their businesses. However, companies that cannot provide the training costs for their employees can learn the basics of the program by partnering with the companies that have already adopted the system. The essay discusses Six Sigma and hospital quality through analysis of an article: Addressing Variation in Hospital Quality.
Examination and analysis of the issues
In the United States, there has been increased attention from the people and other governments because of continuous variation in quality across the health care systems. This means that the government is responsible for providing quality health and care to its people and those who come to seek medical attention from them. The people are entitled to receiving appropriate quality care that is effective. There have been efforts to improve on the quality care provided. Some of the initiatives include reengineering, use of total quality management and also the use of Six Sigma. Continuous Quality Improvement can also be referred to as Total Quality Management.
CQI aims to eliminate poor quality and control variation. This means that there is a focus on customer satisfaction while also striving with the organizational activities. Before the introduction of Six Sigma, quality assurance, improvement, and management were used. Quality assurance was used to identify and eliminate outliers within an organization while quality improvement aimed at decreasing variation so that error can be reduced in addition to improving both clinical and non-clinical processes. Then quality management whose aim was to achieve cus...