In the support of STANDARDIZATION….

I think I should dedicate today to the concept of standardization. It is purely coincidence that I observed the need for standardization in two different aspects of healthcare today and I am writing on them on the same day itself. The previous mention was on having standardized patient satisfaction surveys across Indian hospitals (to copy the idea from HCAHPS).

I read this blog written by CQI CEO Simon Feary on how consistency can save lives. To read the blog, click here. His blog highlights hundreds of different types of bedside medical charts being used in UK hospitals leading to confusion among physicians and deficiencies in capturing important ‘vital signs’.

I think I second Simon’s demand for a consistent medical chart format that helps physicians to take appropriate decisions about patients’ health and safety. On the same thought, what are the opportunities for standardizing clinical documentation in our country?

The Handy Guide To Quality – Chartered Quality Institute

What is Quality? I keep bugging participants during my training sessions on NABH Quality Management System with this question and their answers vary a lot. Well, I found a great answer online today which I found to be the best.

This video, developed by CQI (Chartered Quality Institute), is a superb way to understand Quality in action. Incidentally, CQI also stands for Continuous Quality Improvement!

This 4-minutes video below can be a life-changing experience for some.

Clinical and Managerial Quality Indicators become sharper in NABH Third Edition

NABH deserves our appreciation for proving a lot more clear guidelines and better framed objective elements to remove discretion on the part of different HCOs as part of the released third edition. The standards that benefitted most seem to be (purely on quantifiable terms) those of clinical and managerial quality indicators.

The new edition takes all pains to explain in detail each of the mandatory indicators mentioned in CQI chapter. At the back of the new book, you can find several pages (37 to be precise) detailing each of the quality indicators (QI) mentioned in CQI-3 and CQI-4. The section defines the QI, provides the formula to calculate the QI, also suggests a sample size for proper measurement and gives remarks wherever necessary. In case anyone missed this, NABH also demands each indicator to be captured on a monthly basis and that month’s data only to be referred to for calculating the QI using the newly-provided formulae.

Sometime back I heard from an NABH Principal Assessor that NABH is planning to have a system across its accreditated hospitals using which one could compare these hospitals. Such a comparative system would enable ranking of the accreditated hospitals based on their performance on these measurable QIs. Is the third edition first step in that direction?