Consultants who are considering extending their services to medical professionals or hospitals should study up on some health-care consultants key terms, just to make sure they're speaking the new language of hospital and health-care consultants. Whether your specialty is information technology, marketing, financial management and billing or human resources, there are facets of the national health-care quality movement that apply to every industry and every consultant.
Total Quality Management, or TQM
Although the Total Quality Management theory of W. Edwards Deming is applicable in many industries, it has become a popular tool in health-care quality improvement and consulting. Also called TQM, the theory requires that a health-care organization strive for continuous improvement of every business facet -- including customer service, revenue cycle management and human resources - through teamwork, strategic planning, leadership, communication and recognition.
Medical informatics
Medical informatics, also known as health-care informatics or biomedical informatics, is an interdisciplinary field that combines emerging information technology with medical data for the more efficient and effective use of health-care information. Through medical informatics, statistical science plays an integral role in management decision-making support using biostatistics and engineering.
Oregon Health and Science University.
Patient satisfaction
Patient satisfaction is the newest buzzword in health-care quality improvement. It's a TQM tool most often measured through patient satisfaction surveys and used to improve the delivery of patient services in all areas.
Electronic medical record, or EMR
As modern businesses move toward a paperless business model, health care is no exception, moving from paper-heavy medical records to electronic medical records (EMR). In the consulting world, the move to an EMR-based health system requires help from information technology, process improvement and change management experts.
Core measures
The Joint Commission has set forth a set of National Quality Measures, or core measures, by which hospitals must organize quality improvement efforts to include performance improvement teams, data analysis and reporting and physician pay for performance programs. The core measures target specific hospital practices that need improvement to reduce or eliminate morbidity and mortality that is attributable to poor or outdated standards of care.
Computerized physician order entry, or CPOE
Computerized physician order entry, or CPOE, is a safety initiative designed to eliminate medication errors by involving the physician directly in the medication prescribing process. When a physician orders a medication change or a new prescription for a patient, instead of writing the order by hand or dictating the order for another health-care professional to write on the patient's paper chart, CPOE requires that the physician enter the medication information into the electronic medical record to ensure proper dosing instructions.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
