Despite rising and unsustainable US health care costs, many stakeholders feel that the quality of medical services is limited and inconsistent. Value-based reforms are touted as the key to achieving…
Widespread adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) in the United States is transforming the practice of medicine from a paper-based cottage industry into an integrated health care delivery system. Most…
Improving the quality and efficiency of surgical techniques, reducing technical errors in the operating suite, and ultimately improving patient safety and outcomes through education are common goals in all surgical…
There has been no formal, standardized curriculum for neurosurgical resident education in quality improvement. There are at least 2 reasons to integrate a formalized quality improvement curriculum into resident education:…
The US health care system is currently undergoing a paradigm shift from pay-for-service toward pay-for-performance reimbursement, with a focus on quality measures and patient satisfaction. An important tool gaining increasing…
For a variety of neurosurgical conditions, increasing surgeon and hospital volumes correlate with improved outcomes, such as mortality, complication rates, length of stay, hospital charges, and discharge disposition. Neurosurgeons can…
Innovation to improve patient care quality is a priority of the neurosurgical specialty since its beginnings. As the strain on health care resources increases, the cost of these quality improvements…
Cost and value are increasingly important components of health care discussions. Despite a plethora of cost and cost-effectiveness analyses in many areas of medicine, there has been little of this…
The Model for Improvement and the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle is a popular quality improvement (QI) tool for health care providers to successfully lead QI projects and redesign care processes. This tool…
Although federal programs aimed at improving the overall value of health care are well intentioned, most remain fundamentally flawed in terms of their metrics, their methodologies, and the pace at…
