Question

importance of using common standards in health care.

Answer 1

Health care systems worldwide are striving to improve the quality of healthcare in an atmosphere on Evidence Based Medicine and Evidence Based Healthcare. Healthcare is constantly evolving sharing the strain of development in a larger world that is changing at incredible speed. Because of all the changes in healthcare, the ways in which quality is perceived, pursued, and insured continues to develop.

Quality Health Care means doing the right things the right the first time. A quality system invokes the standards that the organization monitors to guide and regulate all of its activities that create a quality service. It is important to distinguish between quality of health (encompassing health status assessment) and quality of health care (encompassing the structures, processes, and outcomes of health care). The applicathon of health, health care nedds assessments bridges these two areas. The ultimate delivery of health care quality depends as much as on analysis of the delivery and outcomes of the health care for groups of patients (medical care epidemiology) as on analysis of the care of individuals.

Standards of Practice continue to evolve. New diagnosdic and therapeutic interventions are continually being developed. Benchmarking refers to the process by which performance is compared to a standard. Re-engineering refers to a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of processes to achieve dramatic improvement in performance; when it is adapted to the healthcare delivery process, the term clinical reengineering is used.

Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) focuses on industrial methods and Total Quality Management (TQM), on management philosophy, the terms often are used interchangeably because of their shared history and assumptions.

Today’s current healthcare landscape consists of a variety of care settings and stakeholders, which all leverage a number of different information systems in their delivery of care. An individual may touch a number of different systems that must be able to communicate throughout his or her health journey.

From the hospital
This individual could be admitted to the hospital for an acute condition. In this hospital, different vendors may be utilized for their laboratory, pharmacy, and EHR systems, yet each of these systems must be able to seamlessly share data to provide information needed to care for this individual.

From the doctor’s office
After leaving the hospital, the individual likely has other providers involved in the coordination of their care, who exist outside of the hospital’s health system. These physicians may also have different systems within their practices, but still need to access health information on their patient to obtain a more complete picture of their patient’s health.

Personal records
This individual might want to receive a care summary or test results to maintain for their own personal records. As the electronic exchange of health information becomes ubiquitous, the individual, or the consumer, is becoming an increasingly active stakeholder in this ecosystem.

In healthcare, standards provide a common language and set of expectations that enable interoperability between these systems and/or devices. Ideally, data exchange schema and standards should permit data to be shared between clinician, lab, hospital, pharmacy, and patient regardless of application or vendor in order to seamlessly digest information about an individual and improve the overall coordination and delivery of healthcare.