How Is Quality Measured in Healthcare System?

The health-care industry depends on quality management activities to elicit positive outcomes for patients. Quality management offers health-care providers information on ways to improve services so that patients receive optimal care.

Patients

• According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, one way to measure quality in health care is to have the patients tell you about their treatment, services and experience. Through the use of surveys or anonymous calls, patients can inform a health-care organization about which areas were lacking and which areas were exceptional. This information will be used by the organization to make improvements or structural changes.

Performance Measures

• Health-care organizations can set their own internal performance measures to use as a means of measuring the quality of their services. Audits help companies capture internal information, and in health care that means medical charts may be evaluated to determine how well the organization performs in patient treatment.

HEDIS

• The National Committee for Quality Assurance says that HEDIS, the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set, is a tool for measuring quality in health-care settings, and is used by more than 90 percent of America's health plans. With HEDIS, performance measurements are taken across multiple domains of care to determine if a patient is receiving quality services.