Long-term improvement in cost and quality within hospitals

Today's hospitals face a difficult management task: they must change so that the goal of providing quality care to patients is combined with the demand of payors that care be provided at a lower cost. To successfully accomplish this, hospitals must understand the healthcare process, identifying the strengths of that process and focusing those strengths to simultaneously attain both goals. The healthcare process is characterized by a large amount of variability in the resources used for patients, even those patients with a common diagnosis. It is also characterized by customizing the care for an individual patient. As such, the provision of healthcare is difficult to standardize. A major strength of healthcare has been the ability to develop and to adopt new procedures and techniques which improve the quality of care; healthcare is flexible to change. The challenge is to use that strength--the flexibility of healthcare--to improve our performance relative to cost as well as quality.