Questions have been raised about whether and how health care quality improvement (QI) initiatives ought to be reviewed to address possible ethical issues associated with them. These questions have focused primarily on whether some QI initiatives meet the regulatory criteria for human subject research and should therefore be regulated and reviewed as such. Based on surveys of health care system ...

OBJECTIVE To review recent health policies related to measuring child health care quality, the selection processes of national child health quality measures, the nationally recommended quality measures for child mental health care and their evidence strength, the progress made toward developing new measures, and early lessons learned from these national efforts. METHODS Methods used included ...

Quality loss functions have found widespread application in production engineering and today are an indispensable part of quality management. However, they share an obstacle with most other quality concepts concerning their limited communicability to top management. In the allocation of financial resources, a company’s executive board is commonly interested in the profit implications of competi...

Does Merger and Acquisition Activity Play a Role in The Pre-Existing Healthcare Initiatives of Improved Quality and Decreased Costs Highlighted by The Affordable Care Act? by Dawn Constance Mckell July 18, 2016 Chair: Conrad Ciccotello Major Academic Unit: Finance, Wealth Management This is a quantitative study of archival data that examines Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activity using currently...

BACKGROUND Significant gaps in quality pervade U.S. health care, leading to suboptimal care and rising costs. One key factor driving the apparent quality gaps and rising costs in the current health care system is the issue of nonadherence to prescription medications. OBJECTIVE To describe quality gaps in managed care that are driven by nonadherence to prescription medications and characterize...

OBJECTIVE To outline the principles that direct the Veterans Affairs (VA) Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) dedicated to diabetes quality improvement (QUERI-DM). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We discuss the VA initiatives aimed at improving diabetes care for veterans as well as general issues that should be considered in quality improvement initiatives. We specifically describe so...