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The Best Practice: How the New Quality Movement is Transforming Medicine
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Product Description
Americans have always thought their healthcare system was the best in the world. But starting in the late 1990s, shocking reports emerged that showed this was far from the truth. Treatment-related deaths or “complications” were found to be the fifth leading cause of death for Americans, and hundreds of thousands of patients were being harmed by botched medical procedures.
Spurred by the quality crisis, a group of visionary physicians led by Donald Berwick and Paul Batalden embarked on a study of industrial “quality improvement” techniques, daring to apply them to the practice of medicine despite resistance from the medical community. The Best Practice tells the story of this burgeoning movement, and of how the medical landscape is being radically transformed—for the better.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #64466 in Books
- Published on: 2008-07-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
“The Best Practice argues persuasively that, in fact, getting sick in the United States doesn’t beat getting sick in Sweden — or in Denmark, England, Germany, Canada, or just about anywhere else in the developed world, for that matter.”
TheHealthCareBlog.com
“ ‘The Best Practice’ is an amazingly readable book. My amazement is not a reflection on Kenney's writing, but rather that he managed to make health care quality interesting for nearly 300 pages.”
About the Author
Customer Reviews
Real, Measurable Quality in Health Care
This is my favorite example of a visionary solution since reading How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business by Hubbard. Kenney's work would have been a great example for Hubbard and Hubbard's methods would have solved many of the challenges of Donald Berwick and Paul Batalden, the heroes of The Best Practice.
Whether the average patient can tell it or not, the quality of health care is improving measurably thanks largely to a passionate devotion of Berwick and Batalden to their cause. The biggest surprise for me in the book is how even a culture as entrenched as medicine can start to change its ways when quality becomes a quantity that is measured and used as a yardstick for improvement. Champions of the quality control methods W.E. Demming developed for other businesses, Berwick and Batalden decide to implement standards of quality already known in other professions to perhaps the profession perhaps most resistant to objective measurement. And we are all better off for it.
Uncritical review of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's version of health care quality improvement
Very readable, but greatly simplified overview of the health care quality improvement movement. Takes as its center the vision of Don Berwick's Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Unfortunately, while a central tenet of the quality movement is that depending upon heroic performance of individuals is a way to ensure error and mistake, the book takes a heroic approach to the movement itself painting the leading lights as paragons. Doesn't dig deep enough to offer an account of the inertia of healthcare and our nation's failures of cost and quality.
Interesting stuff and a good read
There is some very interesting information in there, things I really had no idea were happening (like studying Toyota to reduce medical errors). Considering I work on the other side of things, actually seeing patients, I feel like this work hits some important points, but perhaps not the most pressing and direct issues that impair providers from providing excellent care every time.
Jessica Sims
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