Essay Example on Quality Healthcare: 6 Attributes for Patient-Driven Reforms

Healthcare organizations are expected to provide quality services in an age of consumer-oriented culture and quality-based reimbursement. Recently attention has shifted from quality as fashionable attention to a major concern in health care reforms (Sadeghi, Barzi, Mikhail & Shabot, 2013). The healthcare quality field ensures effective and efficient care for the patients and has six attributes which are; timely, efficient, effective, safe, patient-driven, and equitable (Schrimmer, Williams, Mercado, Pitts & Polancich, 2019). The following paper will focus on the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) and assess how the organization has impacted healthcare quality.

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NAHQ is a health care organization that define quality standards for healthcare quality professions and also equips organizations and professionals in achieving the set standards. The organization also offers accredited healthcare quality certification (Lagasse, 2019). Some of the responsibilities for NAHQ includes advancing healthcare quality setting, education, and developing the professional by offering extensive educational programming and networking opportunities.

NAHQ has and continues to impact the quality of health care. There has been disjoint, and inconsistent quality progress in the US health system as there lack a specific set of competency standards that would spearhead quality healthcare by providing skills, techniques, and tools to quality professionals in healthcare (Schrimmer et al., 2019). As such, most healthcare organizations have developed and credited individual approaches and quality standards (Schrimmer et al., 2019). In recent research by NAHQ, the results indicated varied readiness in workforce quality in the healthcare sector in meeting current and new healthcare demands. While the results showed success by healthcare quality experts in driving their organizations towards priorities by their healthcare leaders, there were inconsistent set standards defining measurement and how to achieve quality. As such, clinical variation are high and often leads to gaps in quality and cost (Lagasse, 2019).

In a move to address the problem, NAHQ developed a Framework for Healthcare Quality Competencies, which demystifies competencies that healthcare organizations require in meeting their goals. The Framework aims at facilitating competency-based training, which is a tool to cost-effectively reduce and eliminating variability in healthcare (Lagasse, 2019). The Framework, which was created in late 2018, has been reported to reduce variation, such as inpatient transition from acute care facilities (Lagasse, 2019). NAHQ has indeed impacted the quality of healthcare, as standardization is expected to reap the rewards in the healthcare systems.

References

Lagasse, J. (2019). Quality standards framework can improve both clinical and financial performance in healthcare. Retrieved 23 January 2020, from https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/quality-standards-framework-can-improve-both-clinical-and-financial-performance-healthcare

Sadeghi, S., Barzi, A., Mikhail, O., & Shabot, M. M. (2013). Integrating Quality and Strategy.

Schrimmer, K., Williams, N., Mercado, S., Pitts, J., & Polancich, S. (2019). Workforce Competencies for Healthcare Quality Professionals: Leading Quality-Driven Healthcare. The Journal for Healthcare Quality (JHQ), 41(4), 259-265. doi:10.1097/jhq.0000000000000212