This is the fifth in a series of articles about the science of quality improvement. We examine the nature of healthcare commissioning and its role as a driver for quality improvement. We draw on evidence from previous forms of primary-care-led commissioning (PCLC) and consider how the quality of care might be improved through the processes of commissioning.

THE GROWTH OF CHRONIC WASTE 5.4 THE INITIATIVES OF THE 1980S 5.5 Lessons Learned 5.5 The Rate of Improvement Is Decisive 5.5 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 5.6 The Emerging Consensus 5.7 THE REMAINDER OF THIS SECTION 5.7 QUALITY IMPROVEMENT: THE BASIC CONCEPTS 5.7 Improvement Distinguished from Control 5.8 All Improvement Takes Place Project by Project 5.8 Quality Improvement Is Appli...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Previous studies have emphasized the importance of effectual communication during patient handoffs. The objectives of this study were to (1) implement a resident-driven quality improvement project to improve handoffs by including key elements that are necessary for a safe and effective handoff. We chose to use the IPASS (illness severity, patient summary, action items,...

Background: Determining the gap in the quality of educational services, followed by the adoption of appropriate strategies for eliminating or reducing the existing obstacles, is considered the first basic step in developing quality improvement programs for universities. Therefore, this study was conducted to evaluate the quality of educational services of Iranian medical universities.Methods: T...

not taken into account properly [13]. In fact, there As the degree of compliance of quality requirements mainly induces the acceptance and success of a system, special emphasis should be laid on the elicitation, specification and validation of quality requirements. Current requirements definition methods, however, mainly focus on objects, functions, and states. This paper emphasizes quality req...

Total quality in laboratory medicine should be defined as the guarantee that each activity throughout the total testing process is correctly performed, providing valuable medical decision-making and effective patient care. In the past decades, a 10-fold reduction in the analytical error rate has been achieved thanks to improvements in both reliability and standardization of analytical technique...

Introduction Increasing efforts to reform health care and contain medical expenditures have accelerated the push to define, capture, and enforce quality measures for delivered care. This trend is evident particularly for procedural and preventative measures that can have a marked effect on patient outcomes and health care costs, such as the use of colonoscopy for screening and surveillance for ...

This paper examines the role of quality improvement organizations (QIOs, formerly known as PROs, or peer review organizations) in improving the quality of medical care delivered to Medicare beneficiaries in both fee-for-service and managed care environments. It looks at the expansion of the QIOs' portfolio in their new contract cycle to include quality improvement activities in nursing homes, h...