Navigating the quality quagmire

Defining and measuring quality have become business imperatives in many industries. Quality in health care can be achieved only when appropriate care is provided. All other outcome measures that presume to define quality are ineffectual if appropriate care is not delivered first. Without consistently objective clinical process standards in place, it is impossible to measure whether health care processes conform to quality benchmarks. Similarly, without a case-by-case audit trail to determine appropriateness, it is impossible to document such conformance. Clinical decision support criteria, applied at the point of care, are a means to support, measure and prove process quality in health care delivery.