Student Resources (click here for access)

Instructor Resources: Test bank, PowerPoint slides, teaching tips, web links, and answers to exercises and practice labs in the textbook.

Stakeholders at all levels of a healthcare system have a vested interest in improving quality and safety. Managers play instrumental roles in creating and delivering high-quality services but many frontline clinical and administrative staff members are also involved, directly or indirectly, in shaping patient care systems and designing safer, more efficient processes.

Applying Quality Management in Healthcare explores the principles of quality management and provides a variety of practical tools for real-world improvement and problem solving. Unlike many healthcare quality management guides, this book focuses on the systems that form the foundation of a high-quality health services organization. Readers learn which management practices are essential to advancing performance goals, making long-lasting process improvements, and providing the operational systems and tools needed for success.

This edition features new and enhanced material, including the following:

Expanded content on quality tools, improvement models, project teams, and patient safety Strategies for reporting and analyzing data to evaluate performance, from contributor Naveen Kumar, PhD Broader coverage of key foundational principles Case studies illustrating what is required of health services organizations to set the stage for success The nuts and bolts of achieving improved patient safety and quality results in complex systems

In addition, the book provides guidance on managing improvement projects, fostering collaboration, providing a supportive environment for performance improvement, and becoming a high-reliability organization. Concepts are robustly supported by real-life examples, end-of-chapter exercises, and a series of practice labs.

Patrice L. Spath, MA, RHIT, is a health information management professional with broad experience in healthcare quality and safety improvement. She is president of Brown-Spath & Associates, a healthcare publishing and training company in Forest Grove, Oregon, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Health Services Administration of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she teaches online graduate-level courses in patient safety. She also teaches quality management and patient safety in the undergraduate and graduate health administration programs at Pacific University in Oregon, and she is a guest lecturer on patient safety in the healthcare simulation master’s program at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. Over the past 35 years, she has presented more than 400 educational programs and authored numerous books and journal articles on healthcare quality management and patient safety topics.