Commercialization of quality

Without overriding financial imperatives, the commercial marketplace for products and services enabling quality improvement, quality assurance, and quality control has been limited in health care. Companies serving this industry have had a difficult time finding business justification to bring these products to market. However, government initiatives in the past 6 years attempting to reduce health care costs are placing an emphasis on better, more appropriate, and more effective health care delivery through evidence-based medicine. Incentives,penalties, and reimbursements for providers serving Medicare and Medicaid patients are being implemented or altered to encourage this adoption. Within this new environment,quality systems become vital tools in managing optimal operations, and thus, a new commercial marketplace is rapidly evolving for vendors to develop, promote, and profitably sell quality assurance and quality control products and services.With a viable, growing, and competitive market, radiologists, technologists, and radiology administrators may look forward to having a wide choice of quality tools to help them make their departments an invaluable resource in a changing healthcare delivery system.