Quality of Care — What is It?

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Of the many issues now confronting medical professionals, none seems more perplexing than the debate about the quality of care. Just a few years ago, physicians could be confident that they alone had a social mandate to judge and manage the quality of care. Now, that mandate is contested daily in industrial boardrooms, legislative-hearing rooms, and even medical-consultation rooms. The very language of current discussions about the quality of care leaves many physicians tongue-tied and uncomprehending: observed and expected mortality, outcomes and process measures, SF-36, case-mix and case-severity adjustments, profiles, HEDIS measures, control charts, continuous quality improvement, total quality management, . . .