Quality Improvement In Healthcare: A Practical Guide For Providers (Part 3)

This article represents the 3rd installment of a 5-part series intended to simplify the main principles of quality improvement for the healthcare provider.As we have noted previously, the knowledge shared in this series relies heavily on my own experiential learning, gained after more than a decade of direct involvement in quality improvement within healthcare.While I endeavor to cite several key resources within this article, the reader is strongly encouraged to seek out additional literature on this topic for a wider breadth of understanding of these core concepts.The core concepts have been broken down into the following 5 topic areas:1. Picking the right problem for a quality improvement project 2. Performing a gap analysis and constructing a process map Building an aim statement and interventions Defining measures and constructing a PDSA cycle Assessing results in a run chartEach topic area will be reviewed in its own installment in this 5-part series, which readers are encouraged to read in chronological order as the topics are intended to build upon each other and foster a more thorough understanding of the material.As the reader will recall, we began our quality improvement journey together with the following case: Mr. Smith is a 45-year-old male who presents to the hospital with a unilateral throbbing headache of several hours duration.