Quality assurance and quality of care: I. Finding the linkages

Efforts to adapt the problem-oriented record to the complex biopsychosocial determinants of illness and therapeutics are especially difficult with the seriously and persistently ill patient who requires more than a minimal hospital stay and for whom standards of care have not been developed. By focusing on a treatment system's capacity to achieve its goals, this report demonstrates one method for linking quality assurance behaviors with quality of care and integrating the work of the hospital psychiatrist and multidisciplinary team into the medical record. The vehicle for implementing this method is a multidisciplinary treatment-planning form currently used in the charts of an extended-length-of-stay treatment service. Its evolution and rationale are described, and an example form follows this report.