Health Quality 2: Total Quality Management

Course Description
The quality of health care in the United States has garnered significant attention among health care professionals and the public. This course will review: (1) the current state of the quality of health care in the United States, (2) approaches to assess quality of health care and (3) strategies to improve the quality of care. These include the fundamentals of health program planning and evaluation with an emphasis on developing skills in formative, outcome, and impact data collection and analysis. This course emphasizes the use of the Baldridge Healthcare Criteria for Performance Excellence for designing, implementing, and improving organizational frameworks for performance excellence. Topics include program or project management, operations assessment and improvement.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course students must demonstrate mastery of the following competencies:

• Identify key issues related to the quality of health care in the United States.
• Understand conceptual and operational definitions of quality of care from the perspectives of health care systems, providers and patients.
• Assess strengths and weaknesses of strategies that have been implemented or proposed to improve the quality of health care.
• Develop a project to design and evaluate a strategy to improve the quality of health care within a specific health care organization.
  Assess strengths and weaknesses of strategies that have been implemented or proposed to improve the quality of health care within a specific health care organization.
• Demonstrate the ability to anticipate obstacles, developments, and problems by looking ahead several months to over a year.
• Develop a project to design and evaluate a strategy to improve the quality of health care within a specific health care organization/population.
• Demonstrate the ability to plan, execute, and oversee a multi-year, large-scale project involving significant resources, scope, and impact.
• Understand and utilize statistical and financial methods and metrics to set goals and measure clinical as well as organizational performance.
• Demonstrate a commitment to and employment of evidence-based techniques.

Course Director: James Evans PhD, Professor, College of Allied Health Sciences and Quantitative Analysis & Operations Management, College of Business