Relationship between total quality management, critical paths, and outcomes management.
Total quality management (TQM), clinical paths, and outcomes management are high-profile strategies in today's health care environment. Each strategy is distinct, yet there are interrelationships among them. TQM supports a customer-focused organizational culture, providing tools and techniques to identify and solve problems. Clinical paths are tools for enhancing patient care coordination and for identifying system-wide and patient population specific issues. Outcomes management is an integrated system for measuring the results in patient populations over time. There is a recent shift in outcomes measurement towards expanding both the nature of the outcomes examined and the timeframes in which they are studied.
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D003266:Continuity of Patient Care; D019091:Critical Pathways / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D015279:Organizational Culture; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D018802:Patient-Centered Care / Q000458:organization & administration; D011340:Problem Solving; D017749:Total Quality Management / Q000458:organization & administration*