Evaluate business strategies for quality management and continuous improvement of operations

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Introduction

The National Quality Strategy was first published in March 2011 as the National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health Care, and is led by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Mandated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the National Quality Strategy was developed through a transparent and collaborative process with input from a range of stakeholders. More than 300 groups, organizations, and individuals, representing all sectors of the health care industry and the general public, provided comments. Based on this input, the National Quality Strategy established a set of three overarching aimsthree overarching aims that builds on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Triple Aim, supported by six prioritiessix priorities that address the most common health concerns that Americans face. To align with National Quality Strategy, stakeholders can use nine levers to align their core business or organizational functions to drive improvement on the aims and priorities.

Working Together to Improve Quality

Improving health and health care quality can occur only if all sectors, individuals, family members, payers, providers, employers, and communities, make it their mission. Members of the health care community can align to the National Quality Strategy by doing the following, adopt the three aims to provide better, more affordable care for the individual and the community, focus on the six priorities to guide efforts to improve health and health care quality and use one or more of the nine levers to identify core business functions, resources, and/or actions that may serve as means for achieving improved health and health care quality.

Aims

The National Quality Strategy pursues three broad aims. These aims will be used to guide and assess local, State, and national efforts to improve health and the quality of health care. The aims are better care (improve the overall quality, by making health care more patient-centered, reliable, accessible, and safe), healthy people/healthy communities (improve the health of the U.S. population by supporting proven interventions to address behavioral, social and, environmental determinants of health in addition to delivering higher-quality care) and affordable care (reduce the cost of quality health care for individuals, families, employers, and government) (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, September 2014).

Setting Priorities

To advance these aims, the National Quality Strategy focuses on six priorities namely, making care safer by reducing harm caused in the delivery of care, ensuring that each person and family is engaged as partners in their care, promoting effective communication and coordination of care, promoting the most effective prevention and treatment practices for the leading causes of mortality, starting with cardiovascular disease, working with communities to promote wide use of best practices to enable healthy living, making quality care more affordable for individuals, families, employers, and governments by developing and spreading new health care delivery models (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, September 2014).

Using Levers

Each of the nine National Quality Strategy levers represents a core business function, resource, and/or action that stakeholders can use to align to the Strategy. In many cases, stakeholders may already be using these levers but haven’t connected these activities to National Quality Strategy alignment. The nine levers can be mentioned as measurement and feedback (provide performance feedback to plans and providers to improve care), public reporting (compare treatment results, costs and patient experience for consumers), learning and technical assistance (foster learning environments that offer training, resources, tools, and guidance to help organizations achieve quality improvement goals), certification, accreditation, and regulation (adopt or adhere to approaches to meet safety and quality standards), consumer incentives and benefit designs (help consumers adopt healthy behaviors and make informed decisions), payment (reward and incentivize providers to deliver high-quality, patient-centered care), health information technology (improve communication, transparency, and efficiency for better coordinated health and health care), innovation and diffusion (foster innovation in health care quality improvement, and facilitate rapid adoption within and across organizations and communities) and workforce development (investing in people to prepare the next generation of health care professionals and support lifelong learning for providers) (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, September 2014).

Long term goals

The long term goals of all the priorities can be mentioned in the following ways as discussed. The long term goals for making care safer by reducing harm caused in the delivery of care include reduce preventable hospital admissions and readmissions, reduce the incidence of adverse health care-associated conditions and reduce harm from inappropriate or unnecessary care. The long term goals for ensuring that each person and family members are engaged as partners in their care include improve patient, family, and caregiver experience of care related to quality, safety, and access across settings, in partnership with patients, families, and caregivers—and using a shared decision making process—develop culturally sensitive and understandable care plans and enable patients and their families and caregivers to navigate, coordinate, and manage their care appropriately and effectively. Promoting effective communication and coordination of care include improve the quality of care transitions and communications across care settings, improve the quality of life for patients with chronic illness and disability by following a current care plan that anticipates and addresses pain and symptom management, psychosocial needs, and functional status and establish shared accountability and integration of communities and health care systems to improve quality of care and reduce health disparities.

Promoting the most effective prevention and treatment practices for the leading causes of mortality, starting with cardiovascular disease include promote cardiovascular health through community interventions that result in improvement of social, economic, and environmental factors, promote cardiovascular health through interventions that result in adoption of the most healthy lifestyle behaviors across the lifespan and promote cardiovascular health through receipt of effective clinical preventive services across the lifespan in clinical and community settings. Working with communities to promote wide use of best practices to enable healthy living include goals such as promote healthy living and well-being through community interventions that result in improvement of social, economic, and environmental factors, promote healthy living and well-being through interventions that result in adoption of the most important healthy lifestyle behaviors across the lifespan and promote healthy living and well-being through receipt of effective clinical preventive services across the lifespan in clinical and community settings.

Making quality care more affordable for individuals, families, employers, and governments by developing and spreading new health care delivery models include goals that ensure affordable and accessible high-quality health care for people, families, employers, and governments and, support and enable communities to ensure accessible, high-quality care while reducing waste and fraud (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, September 2014).

References:

http://www.ahrq.gov/

• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, AHRQ Publication No. 14-M006-EF
   Revised September 2014