Quality health care is a term thrown around as easily as chips and salsa. The trouble is one of these is easily defined and one not so much.
So, please post a comment with your definition “quality health care.”
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But some doctors question whether the measures that exist can adequately measure quality. And there is little agreement on what measures matter most or are more likely to produce good value. “In many areas of patient care, we do not yet have high-quality outcome measures with enough specificity to drive improvement,” American Medical Association Executive Director James L. Madara wrote in a letter to the quality forum earlier this month.
Some doctors complain that whether patients get better is often out of their control; that outcomes measures take more work, not less; and that being held accountable for outcomes could prompt doctors to avoid treating the sickest patients.
via Debate Heightens Over Measuring Health-Care Quality – WSJ.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
I like the definition of quality: “doing the right thing at the right time”.
Also, an engineering 101 course says you can’t control a system (of any kind) that you can not measure. If you can’t measure quality then you can’t control quality.
There are so many easy measures of quality it’s actually hard to decide where to start. For example, walk into a doctors office and measure the time from the scheduled visit time to the time of actually seeing the provider. Less than 5 minutes is good quality, more than 10 minutes is poor quality. There are zillions of similar measures.
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Here is an interesting quote I found today that is attributed to being an ancient Chinese proverb – ‘He who takes medicine and neglects to diet wastes the skill of his physicians’.
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Here is an interesting quote I found today that is attributed to being an ancient Chinese proverb – “He who takes medicine and neglects to diet wastes the skill of his physicians”.
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Healthcare quality is a team effort. The team is the patient and the doctor. Too many patients are not part of the team. They want to go to the doctor and have the doctor give them a pill that will fix them. A good example is high blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. Everyone knows that the real solution is paying attention to what you eat and getting adequate exercise. Doctors have been giving that advise for many years. Most patients are not part of the team though and continue to go back to the doctor for higher doses of the medications. It is a boon for the pharmaceutical industry but it certainly is not the best medicine available. Patients can only get that best medicine if they participate. Unfortunately, most do not.
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You are so right. In addition, patients generally believe more care, more tests, etc. equal better health care.
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