Todd Lunsford
Syntex Management Systems Inc

The key to improving quality in healthcare organizations is to ensure that unplanned events, issues, audits, reviews, and other quality and risk-related programs are managed effectively and performed consistently. Each should follow a quality improvement cycle, which includes: Discovering and reporting events and issues; Responding to and diagnosing these items and determining their root causes; Implementing, closing, and validating action items to correct the problems at the source and prevent them from occurring in other areas. This paper addresses how to optimize existing processes by applying, monitoring, and improving the key elements of the quality improvement cycle to enable continuous process improvement and streamline communication between members of your team.