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The Best Practice: How the New Quality Movement is Transforming Medicine

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Publisher: PublicAffairs
Author(s): Charles Kenney

Average Customer Rating:

(based on 1 reviews)

Product Description:

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 362
EAN: 9781586486198
ISBN: 1586486195
Label: PublicAffairs
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: PublicAffairs
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: 2008-07-21
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Studio: PublicAffairs

Editorial Review:

Americans have always thought their healthcare system was the best in the world. But starting in the late 1990s, shocking reports emerged that showed this was far from the truth. Treatment-related deaths or “complications” were found to be the fifth leading cause of death for Americans, and hundreds of thousands of patients were being harmed by botched medical procedures.

Spurred by the quality crisis, a group of visionary physicians led by Donald Berwick and Paul Batalden embarked on a study of industrial “quality improvement” techniques, daring to apply them to the practice of medicine despite resistance from the medical community. The Best Practice tells the story of this burgeoning movement, and of how the medical landscape is being radically transformed—for the better.

Customer Reviews:

Customer Rating:

Summary: Real, Measurable Quality in Health Care
Comment: This is my favorite example of a visionary solution since reading How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business by Hubbard. Kenney's work would have been a great example for Hubbard and Hubbard's methods would have solved many of the challenges of Donald Berwick and Paul Batalden, the heroes of The Best Practice.

Whether the average patient can tell it or not, the quality of health care is improving measurably thanks largely to a passionate devotion of Berwick and Batalden to their cause. The biggest surprise for me in the book is how even a culture as entrenched as medicine can start to change its ways when quality becomes a quantity that is measured and used as a yardstick for improvement. Champions of the quality control methods W.E. Demming developed for other businesses, Berwick and Batalden decide to implement standards of quality already known in other professions to perhaps the profession perhaps most resistant to objective measurement. And we are all better off for it.