The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has released the first ever National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health Care. The strategy was required by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as essential to improving health care quality and outcomes as part of national health care reform.
The National Strategy for Quality Improvement has three aims (the “triple aim”): better care, healthy people/healthy communities, affordable care. These three aims will be achieved with six priorities:
*Making care safer by reducing harm caused in the delivery of care, with an initial goal to eliminate preventable health care-acquired conditions
*Ensuring that each person and family are engaged as partners in their care, with an initial goal to build a system that has the capacity to capture and act on patient-reported information, including preferences, desired outcomes, and experiences with health care
*Promoting effective communication and coordination of care, with an initial goal to create a delivery system that is less fragmented and more coordinated, where handoffs are clear, and patients and clinicians have the information they need to optimize the patient-clinician partnership
*Promoting the most effective prevention and treatment practices for the leading causes of mortality, with an initial goal to prevent and reduce the harm caused by cardiovascular disease
*Working with communities to promote wide use of best practices to enable healthy living, with an initial goal to support every U.S. community as it pursues its local health priorities
*Making quality care more affordable for individuals, families, employers, and governments by developing and spreading new health care delivery models, with an initial goal to identify and apply measures that can serve as effective indicators of progress in reducing costs
Finally, the National Strategy for Quality Improvement lists ten “principles” that will be used to guide the implementation of the strategy:
*Payment
*Public reporting
*Quality improvement and technical assistance
*Certification, accreditation and recognition
*Consumer incentives and benefits designs
*Measurement of care processes and outcomes
*Health information technology
*Evaluation and feedback
*Training, professional certification, workforce and capacity development
*Promoting innovation and rapid-cycle learning
Ignatius Bau 