Quality Improvement & Performance Improvement in Healthcare - Essay Sample

Introduction

The quality improvement department’s role is to improve outcomes in regards to the quality of services that patients are given as well as the overall work deliver by a healthcare organization. The performance improvement department is responsible for ensuring that people and systems in a healthcare organization work in a manner that helps improve clinical outcomes, patient experiences as well as reduce organizational costs (Karuppan, Dunlap & Waldrum, 2016).

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The Quality Improvement and Performance Improvement Departments in a hospital organization could and should interface when gathering information that helps inform about areas that require improvement. If these two departments collaborate to find this information, it can reduce the costs and the hustle involved in gathering data. Even though quality improvement departments are focused ensuring that patients receive the care they deserve, there is need to work closely with performance improvement departments because quality can only be improved when people do what they are expected to do. Performance and quality go hand in hand. Performance improvement departments ought to allow the quality improvement departments to teach employees on what they ought to do to adhere to set guidelines and standards to improve the performance and quality of the services that they offer. These departments could interface at the point of monitoring and assessing whether performance or quality is met. They can also interface when providing recommendations for improvement.

The key differences are that quality improvement focuses on bringing about change and betterment in the way healthcare services are delivered. The performance improvement departments are dedicated to seeing that people perform to their very best. However, high performance does not always lead to high quality. The differences in the aims and objectives of these departments cause them to collide (Karuppan, Dunlap & Waldrum, 2016).

The quality and performance improvement departments can improve if they work together to stress on both quality and performance in a healthcare organization. There are opportunities for these departments to improve if people understand why adhering to quality and performance standards is essential to an organization.

The function of the quality improvement department is to better outcomes while the role of performance improvement departments is to reduce an organization's costs, improve clinical outcomes and patient experiences. The optimal functional roles of quality improvement are to measure and assess areas where quality ought to be improved and recommend and implement required standards. Performance improvement departments have a purpose of ensuring that a healthcare organization does exceptionally well compared to rivals at any given time to ensure that patients are satisfied with the services they get.

References

Karuppan, C. M., Dunlap, N. E., & Waldrum, M. R. (2016). Operations management in healthcare: Strategy and practice. New York, NY : Springer Publishing Company.