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Discusses three leadership processes that can help boost improvement efforts in the health care sector of the United States. Problem of death and disability linked with errors in U.S. hospitals; Conditions for improving quality and eliminating unnecessary costs in health care organization; Action strategies. INSETS: Case Study for Achieving Dark Green Savings.;Human Resource Strategies.;Quality Press Releases Three Health Care Books..

An essay is presented on the current challenges in the health care sector as of November 2014. It argues that it is necessary to develop innovative models of care that can reduce costs, improve care delivery and boost health. The authors also discussed the proliferation of massive open online courses, the great promise held by the concept of the flipped classroom, and the community-wide push to promote a culture of health.

According to quality consultant Joseph Juran, quality consists of two things, providing the features the customer needs and ensuring freedom from deficiencies. Most hospitals today are familiar with the Juran trilogy of quality planning, quality control and quality improvement. Hundreds of hospitals use the trilogy as a key organizing principle. Quality planning is about building quality into a process right from the start. Quality control is about maintaining the performance of a process. Quality improvement is about changing a process to improve its performance.

External groups requiring measures now include public and private payers, regulators, accreditors and others that certify performance levels for consumers, patients and payers. Although benefits have accrued from the growth in quality measurement, the recent explosion in the number of measures threatens to shift resources from improving quality to cover a plethora of quality-performance metrics that may have a limited impact on the things that patients and payers want and need (ie, better outcomes, better care, and lower per capita costs). Here we propose a policy that quality measurement should be: balanced to meet the need of end users to judge quality and cost performance and the need of providers to continuously improve the quality, outcomes and costs of their services; and parsimonious to measure quality, outcomes and costs with appropriate metrics that are selected based on end-user needs.

The board has a major role in the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's plan for saving 100,000 patient lives by 2006 through implementation of six proven quality interventions.