Quality Assurance
In Mosby’s Medical Dictionary, Quality Assurance is: “(for health or related reasons) a pledge to the public by those within the various health disciplines that they will work toward the goal of an optimally achievable degree of excellence in the services rendered to every patient” (Mosby’s, 2017, p. 1593).
The medical assistant (MA) can ensure that the Quality Assurance (QA) standard for the outpatient clinic is met through a QA system. Quality Assurance can be achieved through a planned set of actions designed to provide the end-user with the product they expect to receive. The QA system would contain policies that include documentation which would ensure that laboratory testing is accurate, and establishing operating procedures that benefit the patient and the medical assistant who is performing the testing. This documentation includes being able to identify and correct issues when they happen, provide higher standards of care, and improve
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Accurate record keeping.
2. Preventative maintenance procedures.
3. Log or worksheets for recording all changes.
4. Laboratory documentation to ensure the quality of the laboratory process.
Quality Control
In Mosby’s Medical Dictionary, Quality Control is: “a method of repeated assay of known standard materials and the monitoring of reaction parameters to ensure precision and accuracy” (Mosby’s, 2017, p. 1593).
One of the most important things that a medical assistant (MA) can do to is to make sure that instructions for quality control (QC) and patient testing are followed (Kinn’s p 1015). Policies, procedures and checklists are developed to ensure that each test is performed within the guidelines. If these guidelines are not followed, the test results can result in a misdiagnosis or in a delayed treatment.
Examples of guidelines for laboratory and equipment (Kinn’s p 1014-1016):
1. Maintaining and calibrating equipment.
2. Running and analyzing control tests.
3. Record keeping of control
Our role is to make sure we are completing forms thourghly and submitting all required documentation, as well as codes regarding the patients diagnosis. This information is necessary in order to prove why the equipment is necessary for the
6. Maintain a data and information trail that can be readily analyzed for medical audit, research and quality assurance, epidemiological monitoring, disease surveillance (Electronic Medical Records,
In an essay of 1,200 words, provide your assessment, with recommendations, of how the United States, as a country, can best manage quality assurance in the health care workplace going into the future. Questions to consider include:
Follows efficient, logical sequence; balances screening/diagnostic steps for problem; informs patient; sensitive to patient’s comfort, modesty.
quality assurance is a system for evaluating the performance, the quality if the services they provide i.e. what chamberlayne provie for their service users. Many quality assurance procedures would be set by the central government. Standards, governance, and quality control are all essential in any care setting like the NHS of any health service.
Medical office assistants are responsible for a variety of tasks around the health care center, most of which pertain to patients directly. The most critical ability that a MOA must have, is accurately filling out reports, client histories, and other relevant documents. This process is affected by administrative and clinical assistants alike; the administrative assistant checks patients into the office and confirms that their personal information is accurate and up-to-date, while clinical assistants will collect information pertaining to their reason for visiting, vital signs, and other physical attributes. Each detail of a patient’s medical record is important, and even the simplest of errors could seriously affect their examination. When a patient initially enters a health care facility, they are greeted by the administrative assistant
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a federal health reform legislation engineered to provide Americans with high quality, affordable cost and better access to health care [1]. To address these overarching aims, the ACA requires the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish a National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health Care, also known as the National Quality Strategy (NQS) [2]. The strategy sets three aims. First, to make health care more reliable,
The purpose of this paper is to identify a quality safety issue. I will summarize the impact that this issue has on health care delivery. In addition, I will identify quality improvement strategies. Finally, I will share a plan to effectively implement this quality improvement strategy.
For example, a hospital-wide policy can be made making it mandatory for all critical results to be documented and reported within the hour. Attestations can be put in place for all hospital staff to sign, holding them responsible if policies are not followed. Another suggestion would be to have all critical results reported to two sources, for example the patient’s nurse and charge nurse, to increase the likelihood of rapid documentation. The point of the corrective actions is to ensure that each staff member knows what they are responsible for. For example, laboratory staff knows to document the critical values and alert the appropriate nurse or charge nurse, the nurse or charge nurse knows to document the critical lab values or test result and to alert the ordering physician, the ordering physician knows to discuss a treatment plan with the patient and to document appropriately in the chart, etc. The point is, every staff member has a role to play in assisting the hospital in becoming one hundred percent compliant. This corrective action plan holds each staff member accountable. Those who do not comply can easily be tracked and disciplined by their supervisor.
Some hospital trusts and health authorities consistently outperform others on different dimensions of performance. Why? There is some evidence that “management matters”, as well as the combined efforts of individual clinicians and teams. However, studies that have been conducted on the link between the organisation
Answering the call light (also called call bell a handheld like that is attached to the patient room wall, above the headboard of the bed) in a timely manner by the nursing staff in hospital setting is necessary to prevent falls that can harm, prolonged stays, and unnecessarily increase the cost of healthcare. However, researches concerning call light uses as it relates to patient safety, patient-care management and patient satisfaction are limited (Meade et al. 2006). Patients and their families emphasize that nurses should monitor patients constantly and provide assistance and answer a call light in a timely manner (Yoder, 2011). Note that the falls may be caused by several factors such as
My experience in both my previous career in nursing and human resources has dealt with approaches in quality improvement in patient safety and different metrics in the turning up organizational behavior as well as up swinging the operations of the organizations respectively. We live in a rapidly changing world, and healthcare industry is not exempted from it. Because I will be playing an indispensable role in the future, I am very interested on the concept of quality improvement and what not and identify possible future challenges and draw lessons from healthcare organizations that has spearhead innovative changes to providing healthcare by pursuing the triple dimensions of the improvement of healthcare in general that is Improving the patient experience of care (including quality and satisfaction); Enriching the health of populations; and Reducing the per capita cost of health care.
Healthcare providers strive to improve service quality by implementing various quality management programs. Customers tend to seek for higher quality of care when choosing treatments, providers, and health plans. For healthcare organizations that desire to provide high quality care and compete in the global market, choosing a quality management program to implement is critical for performance and efficiency. Many studies have been conducted to analyze the effectiveness of such programs. Lean, Six Sigma and Total Quality Management (TQM) are three programs that will reviewed by three different case studies in efforts to understand them and to compare and contrast their capabilities.
“Nursing is an art, and if it is to be made an art, requires as exclusive a devotion, as hard a preparation, as any painter’s or sculptor’s work...” (Nightingale, 1868)
As a Graduate Nurse, I have gained over two years of experience within the quality analyst field by auditing, analyzing, interpreting and assessing extensive patient chart records as well as lab results for trends, patterns and/or abnormalities all across hospitals in the province of Ontario such as Sunnybrook, Sick Kids, Center