I’ve mentioned the quality issue a couple of times, and have somewhat denigrated the quality movement as being made irrelevant by the backlash against managed care.  However, given the IOM’s "To Err is Human" report on medical errors and more recent "Crossing the Quality Chasm" (note: scroll down for exec sum), it would be unfair to ignore those who are trying to raise its public visibility, such as the CHCF promoting a series on it.  This video about the "Hospitalization from Hell" mostly by Paul Cleary (from Harvard — Here’s the article), is long (50 mins) but if you have a good connection and Realplayer, it’s well worth watching. Clearly suggests that the application of known quality processes used in most industries are still very limited in health care, and that the case he uses as an example is very applicable to most  health care organizations. One of his solutions is that local units and individuals must take responsibility for organizing their own quality process improvement, collect good and useful data, and engage the operations research specialists. This is not unlike the strategy that the German Army used to overrun the French in 1945 — command was decentralized to small units working with knowledge of wider goals (as argued in James Q. Wilson’s book "Bureaucracy"). There are also serious efforts funded by several Foundations to improve quality processes, such as this one in Washington state, funded by RWJ and "blogged" by many of its participants including Marcus Pierson, MD.

The problem here is that I heard all this in 1989, and Don Berwick, the guru of TQM in hospitals wrote the same stuff then as he is writing now.  Every other industry has been forced into using quality improvement techniques.  So this morning I heard about 2 examples of patients I know in the SF Bay Area who were served very badly.  One was not called back as promised about a potentially very serious test result. After calling the medical group, no one could locate the result or the file.  And then they couldn’t do anything other than give the patient another appointment. The other concerns a new patient who was left on hold for 25 minutes by the medical group. Let’s face it, none of us would put up with this from any other type of consumer service organization.  Why do we expect it from health care orgs, and is it our fault for doing so?