Quality Standards In Health Care

Healthcare has evolved over past decades and continues to remain an issue of concern for individuals everywhere. Effectively managing data is important to improving the performance in the health care system. Accumulating, evaluating, deciphering and acting on data for particular performance measures allow health professionals to identify shortcomings and make the necessary adjustment, and track the outcome.

 Maintenance of complete and accurate medical records for each patient as described in RC.01.01.01. This standard was also identified by JACHO as top compliance issue for the industry.

Utilize health information professionals and practice to ensure compliance with health data structures, standards and content.

You are absolutely right. Consistency is always key when maintaining any standardized process. In fact, data consistency is one the essential characteristics of quality data listed in the AHIMA data quality model. As you mentioned earlier, having health care originations adhere to their own guidelines, in regard to data standards, could be problematic. Simply because, we cannot guarantee that data codes from one organization are going to be transcribed correctly by another health care facility that uses different codes and standards. But If health organizations conformed to one data standard we could greatly reduce transcribed error rates, thus promoting data consistency.

Building Rapport - It provides an opportunity for individuals to develop and build on rapport with colleagues. The employee gets to know their colleagues intimately, at least in context of the business environment, whereby strengths and weaknesses are identified and worked on.

Apply accurate, complete, and consistent coding practices for the production of high-quality of healthcare data.

AHIMA recognizes that superior quality health care and clinical data are critical resources needed for effective healthcare, and works to assure that the health information used in care, research, and health management is valid, accurate, complete, trustworthy, and timely. This group is concerned about the effective management of health information from all sources and its application in all forms of healthcare and wellness preservation. Health issues, disease, and care quality also transcend across national borders. AHIMA’s professional interest is in the application of best health information management practices when and wherever they are needed. (The American Health Information Management Association, 2010).

Take part in courses to learn new skills to incorporate into day to day working.

There is an accentuation on the need for quality of coded data with the use of computer-assisted coding in healthcare organizations to assure compliance is being met with regards to the increasingly multifaceted quality reporting requirements.

The first quality initiative that could increase patient satisfaction and potentially reduce healthcare cost is the national data warehouse. According to Brennan, Cafarella, Kocot, McKethan, Morrison, Nguyen, Shepard & Williams II (2009), “this type of quality analysis needs to be valuable to both payers and consumers. For payers, quality analysis helps them potentially understand payment mechanisms, quality providers, regional differences and medical management techniques. For consumers, there is a better understanding of practice and potentially cost differences of providers. So, the primary purpose for creating a national data warehouse will be to develop key quality measures that all parties can agree on.” The second quality initiative that could increase patient satisfaction and potentially reduce healthcare cost is creating one common contract between all health plans and providers (Brennan et al., 2009). According to Brennan et al., (2009), “to accomplish this, a national group comprised of government personnel and knowledgeable provider contractors from the health plans will set national guidelines. Regional contracting groups will be entirely made up of current health plan contractors and will do the local contracting under

Health care systems are reporting and monitoring quality of care indicator data with increasing regularity.

Quality is what individuals seek in health care services. Health care should meet the highest quality standards possible. Quality is a result of many factors which include patient satisfaction, provider involvement and also costs. High quality health care requires services that are expensive. Thus, health care payers have a tremendous impact on health care quality. The quality received in health care depends on the amount of money spent on the care. If health care providers are not paid enough for the services they provide, they will not provide those services anymore. In the past, there was a visible gap between the health care provided depending on socioeconomic status. What type of insurance one has impacts the type of health treatment that individual received. A study done in New York compared the differences between health care quality for the underprivileged and the wealthy. In the comparison among women who lived in the southwest Bronx and upper eastside of Manhattan, the women who lived in Bronx were more likely to die of diabetes than the women who lived in Manhattan (Calman, 2005). Various factors contribute to these finding but these women resided only two subway stops apart and because of the economic status they have, the quality in the health care they received differed. This causes preventable deaths to occur due to the lack of quality related to costs. Health care payers affect the quality of care. Health care facilities treat health care payers differently.

In lecture four, Quality in Health Services, there is a great deal of information concerning how quality can be achieved, particularly within the health care industry. However, rather than examining various methods and theories regarding quality assurance in health care, it may prove more insightful to learn about quality assurance by examining how it’s accomplished in a “real world” setting at The Royal Children’s Hospital.

Quality measures are strategies that gauge, evaluate or compute health care processes, results, discernments, patient insight, and administrative structure. In addition, quality measures are frameworks that are connected with the capacity to deliver first-class health care and/or that are able to identify with one or more quality objectives for medicinal services. These objectives include: compelling, protected, effective, quiet focused, impartial, and opportune consideration. Quality measures can be used to measure quality improvement, public reporting, and pay-for-reporting programs specific for health care providers (CMS.gov, 2016). There are an assortment of quality measures in which health care organizations can use to determine the status of the care they are delivering. Many are appropriate, but few are chosen for this research paper. Among them are: National Health Care Surveys, Hospital IQR Programs, Scorecards, and Political, Power, and Perception/Data for Decision-making tools.

These rankings emphasize the point that the achievements that the USA has made do not match those of the United Kingdom, even if the United States shows many perfect clinical mileages, and it provides a high response to patients who are insured.