Learn the Purpose of Quality Management in Healthcare
Quality is a non-negotiable aspect of the healthcare sector. The reason is obviously the wellbeing of the patients. They must get quality care and treatment from the healthcare organizations to recover quickly. Quality management is hence a fundamental part of the operational strategy of healthcare organizations and it is intended to benefit both the patients and service providers (doctors, nurses and others). If you own a healthcare company, knowing what the purpose of quality management in healthcare is essential. Achieving excellence in quality is the straightforward way to create your mark in the health industry.
The ever-increasing demand for healthcare services has also made quality management a foremost important aspect. With more varied types of services, it is becoming challenging for healthcare organizations to take care of quality while ensuring the affordability and timeliness of their services. Streamlining of operations, centralized management of workflows, collecting patient records, and monitoring of quality assurance methods are some of the key ways to ensure the quality of your services. Therefore, you need to make sure that your quality management framework helps with these. The following section tells you the key purposes of quality management in healthcare so that you can develop and implement your QMS properly.
Consider these Purposes of Quality Management in the Healthcare Sector
When you implement a QMS in your healthcare organization, it must be able to serve the following purposes.
Continuous Process Improvement
Ensuring the quality of your health services is necessary for the wellness of the patients and also to improve their satisfaction level. Continually making improvements in the processes that are related to your health services is useful for increasing the satisfaction of patients.
When there is a process improvement, the management of your healthcare facility must train the staff and make them aware of that. They must communicate how the practical needs of the patients and their families can be better fulfilled with such process improvement. As a key focus of your QMS is continual improvement, the management should assign a team to periodically check various health functions to identify areas for improvements in their processes.
Delivery of Quality Services
Quality assurance in a healthcare facility is achieved by managing its overall operations in an effective manner. It can be done by applying various quality standards and practices. Hospitals or healthcare organizations can follow the general quality management standard like ISO 9001 with their QMS. You can get guidelines and requirements to facilitate your QMS and ensure the quality of your services. With the compliance of an internationally acclaimed standard, your healthcare facility can also demonstrate its commitment to quality health services to the patients. It indicates that you care about your patients’ wellbeing and so strive consistently to provide them with exceptional services.
Your healthcare organization should be able to measure the quality compliance level in terms of patients’ positive feedback or complaints. Subsequently, you can make modifications in your processes and improve the quality level of your services.
Reduction of Operational Costs
Reduction in the day-to-day operational costs must be another crucial purpose of your quality management approach. It makes your health services affordable to a variety of patients and also maintains your profit margin. However, quality and safety are not negotiable by customers in healthcare. Therefore, your cost reduction strategies should no way compromise the quality or safety of your services.
A QMS helps you to systematically evaluate all your operations to remove the redundancies in the processes, reduce waste of resources, and automate repetitive works. Accordingly, you can implement a strategy that helps to achieve these and reduce your costs.
Increasing Productivity
Improving the productivity of employees or staff at your healthcare facility must be a vital purpose of your quality management approach. It naturally helps in improving the productivity of your healthcare facility and meeting the demands of more number of patients at a time. Employee performance is directly related to productivity. You must define the benchmark of performance for your staff. The QMS should assist your management team in assessing, monitoring, and measuring their performance from time to time.
Improving the Throughput Time
Lastly, the quality management approach of your healthcare organization is incompetent if it does not contribute to increasing the throughput time. It is the total time taken by the hospitals or health service organizations to perform all the therapeutic or treatment methods on the patients. These include consultation with doctors, diagnosis processes, generation of medical reports, and so on.
In fact, throughput time is related to all the operations where patients come in direct contact with your organization. Therefore, increasing the throughput time has a positive impact not only on the patients’ satisfaction level but also improves the credibility of your organization.
Key Takeaway
With the above points, we attempted to help you understand the purpose of quality management in healthcare so that you can build a solid and comprehensive Quality Management System (QMS) for your organization. Quality is the basic and most important aspect to fulfill by every organization including that of healthcare. Therefore, to ensure the safety of patients and sustain the quality of your services, get these addressed with a strong QMS.
Also, your implemented QMS should be compliant i.e., able to meet the requirements and guidelines of ISO 9001 standard. This helps in showing the commitment of your healthcare organization to quality management practices which enhances your competitiveness in the industry.
Do you own a healthcare organization and are concerned about implementing a QMS? We, at Compliancehelp Consulting LLC, can help you to focus on quality management with the establishment of a customized and ISO 9001 compliant QMS in your healthcare organization. Get in touch with our experts today!