Dynamic change continues to characterize the health care delivery environment in the early 1990s. Within such an environment, institutional care providers in particular must develop and implement new and effective strategies, if they are to remain viable entities.
It has been widely reported and acknowledged that the fastest growing segment of the domestic economy of the United States since the mid 1960s has been the health care sector. Beginning in the late 1970s, government and private health care funders, as well as the general public, began to express public concerns over the rising costs associated with health care.
On a national basis, approximately $750 billion was spent in the United States in 1992 on the provision of health care services. In the 1990s, health care expenditures accounted for approximately 10 percent of the gross national product. Further, the rate of price inflation for health care costs is higher than that for all items. Thus, during the remaining years of the twentieth century, health care costs can be reasonably expected to consume an increasingly larger proportion of the country's gross national product.
As a result of a combination of factors (increasing costs of health care, changing societal values, advances in treatment therapies, changing demographics, and many others), the delivery of health care services in the United States is undergoing rapid and important change in the last years of the twentieth century. Cost is a major factor involved in changes in delivery of
services. It is, therefore, imperative for health care delivery organizations to develop procedures that will lead to more effective and more efficient operations. The improvement of quality in all aspects of a health care institution's activities has been linked to this goal (Cleverly and Harvey, 1992, p. 40).
This project assessed the training and development of a cross functional chartered quality improvement te...