Quality Assurance and Quality Management for Hospitals

Quality Assurance and Quality Management Paper
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Quality Assurance and Quality Management Paper
Introduction
Notably, Hospital Compare is a website that primarily focuses on providing vital information about the cost and quality of care services provided at the Medicare-certified hospitals in the United States. The information offered on this website includes the provision of effective and timely care by the hospitals, medical imaging usage, the rate of death and readmission, and patient experience. In this assignment, two hospitals that have been chosen for comparison through the information provided on the home Compare site are "Inova Fairfax Hospital" and "Fair Oaks Hospital," located in Virginia.
Analyze the quality, safety, outcomes, and satisfaction data for each of the two selected hospitals. What stands out in the data of each hospital from a managerial and a consumer viewpoint?
For Inova Fairfax Hospital, on the Hospital Compare website, a comparative report was provided based on the survey completed, where the public was invited to issue their opinions about the facility's performance. The survey collected information on the quality, cost, and safety of the care services provided at Inova Fairfax Hospital and the effective use of medical resources. The information was used to increase the knowledge of the public regarding the quality of in-patient care management, maternity care, surgical conditions, and medication safety in the hospital. For Fair Oaks Hospital, the Hospital Compare website provided a quality rating of the facility. The information provided included patient safety, readmissions, complications, infections, and death rates. The information also entailed the effectiveness and timeliness of medical procedures such as organ transplant, angioplasty, heart attack, labor and delivery, and cancer surgery. Additionally, information was provided pertaining to the provision of adult care and services for people with disabilities.
From a managerial and consumer viewpoint, what stood out in each hospital's data is the representation and display of the compared information in summarized statistical format using tables, charts, and graphs. The compared information related to the services offered and their performance based on the checkpoints of clinical quality and safety indicators. The information also reported the history of the prevalence of deaths due to medical errors, preventable harm, or professional negligence. The reported information can thus be easily compared at a mere glance without going into details of all the nitty-gritty contents. Therefore, this information can be used as the foundational threshold for the quality management system.
As informed by Duffy et al. (2019), a quality management system is a systematic structure that enables different healthcare organizations to meet the value-based goals to foster the delivery of affordable and quality care services. As a result, the managers can adopt this information to determine the areas where the organization needs to improve the delivery of the medical services to continue attracting more patients as their preferred care facility destination. ...