Quality assurance and medical outcomes in the era of cost containment

Market forces are driving health care organizations to "prove" quality while diminishing costs. Payers for health care, led by large employers and insurance companies, are demanding clinical, financial, and satisfaction outcomes from providers. To meet the challenge, traditional quality assurance based on inspection and rooting out "bad apples" is rapidly being replaced by the industrial engineering principles of continuous quality improvement. A philosophical shift is occurring from a focus on episodes of care delivered by physicians to the delivery of processes of care by teams of health care personnel. We are seeing a shift in emphasis from a fascination with intensive care delivered to sick patients to cost-effective preventive services delivered to populations of well patients. The locus of care delivery is moving from inpatient hospitals to ambulatory clinics and home care. The need for this information is leading to innovation in computer systems and health care organizations. New partnerships are emerging between physicians, nurses, and hospitals. Traditional oversight bodies including the JCAHO and the HCFA-sponsored PROs are restructuring to meet these new demands. New organizations such as the National Committee on Quality Assurance and state governmental agencies are being established to fill the perceived void. Individual surgeons have begun to receive performance data on their individual and group practices. Professional societies have collaborated in the development of clinical guidelines and outcomes data bases. This massive reorganization will take several more years to play out. With careful development it has the potential to dramatically improve patient care through the efficient application of new scientific knowledge and the sustained flow of information back to physicians and patients.