Healthcare Quality Improvement: The Need for a Macro-Systems Approach

While the structure of healthcare systems evolved out of the need to address acute conditions, the function of healthcare systems evolved to primarily address chronic conditions. The healthcare delivery system organically developed to respond to "one-off" acute illness or injury. Subsequently, healthcare delivery systems grew into legacy systems that evolved into complex systems over time. Healthcare delivery for acute conditions tends to utilize a specific part or form of the healthcare delivery system. In contrast, healthcare delivery for chronic conditions forces patients to seek care over time between different places or healthcare entities. Because of the self-contained structural organization of these healthcare delivery systems, they were not designed to provide coordinated, integrated, and longitudinal care over time and place. Consequently, today's complex legacy healthcare delivery system requires significant improvement in the quality of care delivered to patients, especially those with chronic conditions. As a complex and legacy system, the most appropriate approach to improve the quality of delivered care is through a re-design quality improvement process, rather than a new system design process. In this paper, we describe the conceptual framework for quality improvement (QI) and the current micro and macro level approaches to quality improvement. We applied the current quality improvement approaches to the QI conceptual framework. We identified the limitations in current quality improvement processes in complex healthcare systems at the macro-level, pointing to the need for macro-systems approaches to healthcare quality improvement.