The ever growing healthcare sector is facing tremendous challenges in order to keep pace with the new developments in healthcare infrastructure. Healthcare Providers (HCPs) face a number of challenges pertaining to quality, efficiency and equity. In order to ensure quality improvement in healthcare to deliver standard services, improve performance and achieve patient satisfaction, HCPs use quality strategic planning. This not only improves the overall standard of services in patient-care but also aids in exceeding their expectations. Total Quality Management (TQM) is the roadmap that acts as an enabler for HCPs to enhance their competitiveness through employee involvement, customer driven quality procedures and process of continuous improvement.

Need for Healthcare Quality Management

It can be observed that during the past few years, health care costs have increased manifold. This could be due to several reasons including

• Technology and medicinal advancements
• Greater  prominence for treatments due to  negligence of  preventive adoption methods
• Increased expenditure on critical diseases  that mostly intervene in the later ages
• High costs of insurance administration
• Bad  resource allocation
• Increasing complexity of healthcare services
• Diminishing boundaries between physicians, specialists ,nurses and other personnel
• Lack of trained medicos

Domains to be considered for determining Quality of Healthcare

• Safety  to ensure that patients are not injured during care procedures
• Effectiveness for preventing  overuse and misuse of care
• Patient-Centric Approach by providing care that is completely customized to the patient’s needs.
• Timeliness by reducing waiting times and unwanted delays to both patients and providers.
• Efficiency  by minimizing  waste of diagnostic equipment and medical supplies
• Equitability by providing compassionate care that does not depend upon intrinsic personal characteristics.

Ways for achieving TQM in Healthcare

• TQM in healthcare should encompass a mechanism that ensures standard healthcare is delivered in all hospitals, nursing homes, private clinics, diagnostic centres, surgical treatment homes and even with emergency service providers like ambulances through licenses and certification processes.
• Periodic surveys must be conducted for inspecting patient complaints and finding remedies for rectifying and eliminating them. This is very crucial because if the patients needs are not met, there is a likelihood of sharing opinions and criticism on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc thereby damaging the reputation and promotional perspectives of the HCP.
• Additionally, by incorporating accreditation mechanisms (like HIPAA), HCPs can expand their existing clientele by conforming to prospective customers of their capabilities on providing quality healthcare services.

Hospital Performance Management (HPM)

HPM system is an enabler for hospitals to improve the quality of patient care, optimise resource utilization by transforming data to portray meaningful information pertaining to patient satisfaction, financial and revenue aspects, outcome patterns, patient preferences and complaint resolution and also enhance operating efficiencies. HPMs essentially have capabilities of powerful data analysis, real time processing of information and user friendly graphic report generation.

Uses of HPM

• Identifying potential opportunities for new capability building and also conducting healthcare prevention programmes
• Streamlining revenue generation
• Enhancing efficiency of certain critical processes to avoid bottle-necks
• Identifying relevant diagnostic groups for quality enhancements
• Optimising resource allocation and staffing procedures
• Proactively identifying and resolving important business threats
• Maintaining and monitoring regulatory compliance tasks against health standards
• Establishing meaning relationships between key metrics like  mortality rates, duration of hospitalization

Some Indian Organizations involved in Healthcare Quality

• National Accreditation Board for Hospital & Healthcare providers (NABH)
• Patient Safety Alliance (PSA)
• National Health Systems Resource Centre (NHSRC)
• All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)

Conclusion

Adoption and efficiency of TQM is critical for HCPs because they are dealing with the most important and valuable asset -‘Human Life’ for which there is absolutely no replacement. This is also critical as HCPs need to realign and reposition themselves for catering to future challenges.