Medical Care Quality Assessment Methods
Quality assessment in health care is the practice of measuring and quantifying the outcomes and performance of health care systems based on specific quality standards. The goal of measuring and comparing the performance of health care is to improve the health of society, lower per capita cost of health care, reduce staff burnout, and most importantly, improve patient care.
There are three main types of health care quality measures classified as structure, process, and outcome. This classification system is known as the Donabedian model and was named after the physician who developed it.
- Structural Measures
Structural measures assess the ability of a provider to deliver quality patient care. This method looks at factors such as the accessibility to health care facilities, including the hospital, doctor’s office, and other treatment centers. Structural measures also look at Infrastructures such as the availability of modern medical tools, like modern electronic medicals records and medication order entry systems. One example of a structural measure is the ratio of health care providers to patients. This model is mainly employed by insurance companies and accreditation institutions when seeking to establish the quality of care offered by the facility.
- Process Measures
Process measures are simply what the facility does to maintain health and improve the health of both healthy people and those with living with different conditions. These measures seek to establish whether people diagnosed with various medical conditions are receiving appropriate care and treatment. Process measures are often used by public facilities to evaluate whether the institutions are meeting the generally-accepted standards of practice. Examples of process measures are the number of people receiving preventive services such as vaccinations or the percentage of people undergoing cancer treatment.
- Outcome Measures
Outcome measures show the impact of the services and treatment on the health of the patients. Examples of outcome measures include the percentage of patients with diabetes whose blood sugar is under control, Surgical mortality rates, and complications resulting from the surgeries. While outcome measures are reliably used to indicate the quality of health care, the results are often subject to various unaccounted factors such as population compositions and health status of the patients. Therefore, risk adjustment methods are used for more accurate results relating to the quality of health care.
Some other measures used to assess the quality of health care include patient’s experience measures and access measures. However, these two measures are not as widely used and are sometimes integrated under the Donabedian model.
