This is the fifth in a series of articles about the science of quality improvement. We examine the nature of healthcare commissioning and its role as a driver for quality improvement. We draw on evidence from previous forms of primary-care-led commissioning (PCLC) and consider how the quality of care might be improved through the processes of commissioning.

THE GROWTH OF CHRONIC WASTE 5.4 THE INITIATIVES OF THE 1980S 5.5 Lessons Learned 5.5 The Rate of Improvement Is Decisive 5.5 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 5.6 The Emerging Consensus 5.7 THE REMAINDER OF THIS SECTION 5.7 QUALITY IMPROVEMENT: THE BASIC CONCEPTS 5.7 Improvement Distinguished from Control 5.8 All Improvement Takes Place Project by Project 5.8 Quality Improvement Is Appli...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Previous studies have emphasized the importance of effectual communication during patient handoffs. The objectives of this study were to (1) implement a resident-driven quality improvement project to improve handoffs by including key elements that are necessary for a safe and effective handoff. We chose to use the IPASS (illness severity, patient summary, action items,...

Patient engagement has become a primary care research and practice priority. Little guidance exists, however, on how best to engage patients in primary care practice improvement, or how to measure the impact of their engagement. We present an overview of group concept mapping as a method for engaging patients in primary care practice improvement. We detail the group concept mapping process as a...

  Background: Conduction of thesis by the students is one of their major academic activities. Thesis quality and acquired experiences are highly dependent on the supervision. Our study is aimed at identifing the challenges in thesis supervision from both students and faculty members point of view.   Methods : This study was conducted using individual in-depth interviews and Focus Group Discussi...

The launch of Hospital Pediatrics as a full-fl edged journal represents a major turning point in the development of pediatric hospital medicine as an academic fi eld and demonstrates that we have a suffi cient number of scientifi c inquiries to warrant an independent, peer-reviewed journal. How ever, there are persistent challenges for hospitalists who desire an academic career, including insuf...

BACKGROUND Reducing 30-day heart failure readmission rates is a national priority. Yet, little is known about how hospitals address the problem and whether hospital-based processes of care are associated with reductions in readmission rates. METHODS AND RESULTS We surveyed 100 randomly selected hospitals participating in the Get With the Guidelines-Heart Failure quality improvement program re...

Background: Determining the gap in the quality of educational services, followed by the adoption of appropriate strategies for eliminating or reducing the existing obstacles, is considered the first basic step in developing quality improvement programs for universities. Therefore, this study was conducted to evaluate the quality of educational services of Iranian medical universities.Methods: T...

MIMIC-III ('Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care') is a large, single-center database comprising information relating to patients admitted to critical care units at a large tertiary care hospital. Data includes vital signs, medications, laboratory measurements, observations and notes charted by care providers, fluid balance, procedure codes, diagnostic codes, imaging reports, hospital le...