Creating High Reliability in Health Care Organizations

Making noncatastrophic health care processes reliable: Learning to walk before running in creating high-reliability organizations.

Health care clinicians successfully apply proven medical evidence in common acute, chronic, or preventive care processes less than 80 percent of the time. This low level of reliability at the basic process level means that health care's efforts to improve reliability start from a different baseline from most other industries, and therefore may require a different approach. This paper describes ...

Design of high reliability organizations in health care.

To improve safety performance, many healthcare organizations have sought to emulate high reliability organizations from industries such as nuclear power, chemical processing, and military operations. We outline high reliability design principles for healthcare organizations including both the formal structures and the informal practices that complement those structures. A stage model of organiz...

Struggling to invent high-reliability organizations in health care settings: Insights from the field.

The Mission of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has been to support and conduct health services research and to disseminate those research findings. Recently the Agency has changed its mission to: "Improving the quality, safety, efficiency and effectiveness of health care for all Americans." For agency personnel working with the topic of patient safety, that change has crea...

Conflict in health care organizations.

Creating integrated health care

It was the ambition of this thesis to contribute to the growing interest in integrated care and to the ongoing research in this area by exploring the Swedish development of integrated health care. The general purpose was to study different strategies to improve integration in the Swedish health care system in order to identify some of the key issues and conditions in the creation of integrated ...