Health care quality

Health care quality is a level of value provided by any health care resource, as determined by some measurement. As with quality in other fields, it is an assessment of whether something is good enough and whether it is suitable for its purpose. The goal of health care is to provide medical resources of high quality to all who need them; that is, to ensure good quality of life, to cure illnesses when possible, to extend life expectancy, and so on. Researchers use a variety of quality measures to attempt to determine health care quality, including counts of a therapy's reduction or lessening of diseases identified by medical diagnosis, a decrease in the number of risk factors which people have following preventive care, or a survey of health indicators in a population who are accessing certain kinds of care.

Health care quality is the degree to which health care services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes. Quality of care plays an important role in describing the iron triangle of health care, which defines the intricate relationships between quality, cost, and accessibility of health care within a community. Researchers measure health care quality to identify problems caused by overuse, underuse, or misuse of health resources. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine released six domains to measure and describe quality of care in health:

While essential for determining the effect of health services research interventions, measuring quality of care poses some challenges due to the limited number of outcomes that are measurable. Structural measures describe the providers’ ability to provide high quality care, process measures describe the actions taken to maintain or improve community health, and outcome measures describe the impact of a health care intervention. Furthermore, due to strict regulations placed on health services research, data sources are not always complete.

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