Development of a discharge lounge: the use of E-mail to facilitate the quality improvement process

Quality improvement is often seen as a time-consuming and cumbersome process with high "people" overhead as employees are pulled from their regular duties to attend meetings. As a result, there has been a trend toward tackling smaller, well defined problems with quickly achievable results. The E-mail approach used in this instance offers an approach that may bridge this gap. It allows a large group of people to participate in a complex project without the need for structured meetings spread out over a long period of time. The result, a blend of the strong points of quality improvement (inclusive, using the wisdom of a group of people) with a speedy, low overhead process, seems to address the concerns that have slowed the acceptance of the quality improvement process in many organizations thus far.