2002_10 | QUALITY IMPROVEMENT: It's Not the Road You... -
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Published on: 11/1/2002
Last Visited: 11/1/2002
"People here are fairly comfortable and fluent using these approaches," says Jed Weissberg, MD, associate executive director of quality and performance improvement for the Permanente Federation, "but we no longer have cult-like devotion to Juran or Deming or anyone else.We have taken what we find useful from all of these approaches for our day-to-day tool set."
It's difficult to put a price tag on QI, but the case for improvement becomes more compelling every day.There's the human cost of avoidable morbidity and mortality, not to mention the economic cost."Reducing the Costs of Poor Quality Health Care Through Responsible Purchasing," a June report by the Juran Institute and the Severyn Group for the Midwest Business Group on Health, estimates that administrative inefficiencies, together with overuse, underuse, and misuse of clinical services, waste 30 cents of every health care dollar.