Addressing Variation in Hospital Quality: Is Six Sigma the Answer?

Six Sigma and Hospital Quality
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Six Sigma and Hospital Quality
Introduction
The main aim of healthcare is to provide quality care to the people. Various hospitals and health systems around the globe continue to provide care that has varying quality. People appreciate quality services, and that is what makes them returning customers. In addition to that, people feel satisfied and happy. However, with time, health care has deteriorated leading to the dissatisfaction of the customers. This poses a challenge to administrators since they have the role to improve the quality of care provided in their organizations. Using quality management models can be one of the best approaches used to improve quality. There has been the invention of Six Sigma to help solve the above problem. Six Sigma is a program that uses data analysis to come up with free processes and also decrease variation. This program can offer solutions to the issues faced by management by providing a long lasting solution to quality improvement.
In a nutshell, Six Sigma can be defined as a quality program that aims at improving the customer’s medical experience as it lowers the associated medical and clinical costs, and further aims at building better leaders in the medical branch to enhance the quality of medical treatment. However, every company that wants to adopt Six Sigma must have the employees undergo training first. This is to help the employees apply the methodology concerning the business. Sadly, the training is expensive and not all the companies can afford the training costs. Small businesses are the most affected since they do not have enough capital to run their businesses. However, companies that cannot provide the training costs for their employees can learn the basics of the program by partnering with the companies that have already adopted the system. The essay discusses Six Sigma and hospital quality through analysis of an article: Addressing Variation in Hospital Quality.
Examination and analysis of the issues
In the United States, there has been increased attention from the people and other governments because of continuous variation in quality across the health care systems. This means that the government is responsible for providing quality health and care to its people and those who come to seek medical attention from them. The people are entitled to receiving appropriate quality care that is effective. There have been efforts to improve on the quality care provided. Some of the initiatives include reengineering, use of total quality management and also the use of Six Sigma. Continuous Quality Improvement can also be referred to as Total Quality Management.
CQI aims to eliminate poor quality and control variation. This means that there is a focus on customer satisfaction while also striving with the organizational activities. Before the introduction of Six Sigma, quality assurance, improvement, and management were used. Quality assurance was used to identify and eliminate outliers within an organization while quality improvement aimed at decreasing variation so that error can be reduced in addition to improving both clinical and non-clinical processes. Then quality management whose aim was to achieve customer satisfaction was replaced by Six Sigma. Irrespective of the advancements in medicine that seems to restore the importance of the Six Sigma medical approach, the Six Sigma is pivotal in ensuring that patients receive excellent and quality medical care at affordable costs.
Summary of the findings and recommendations
Some organizations have used CQI model, and it is true that it has some benefits. These organizations have gotten varied results after applying such models. Although the process is not as expensive as According to a Healthcare system in Savannah, Georgia, the model decreased the waiting line of the patient by over 70 percent in one year. This helped in saving in over two hundred thousand dollars and an extra a hundred thousand due to the change in antibiotics and the increased efficiency. This process is valuable to some organizations (Muraliraj, Zailani, Kuppusamy, &Santha, 2018). Findings further suggest that there have been subsequent advancements in the use of the Six Sigma to enhance the collection of data and improve the overall medical performance to ensure quality healthcare.
The advancements in the Six Sigma are essential in addressing various medical variations that may be involved in healthcare. One of these accuracies is the enhancement of efficiency by the elimination of the root causes of errors that might skew medical operations across healthcare centers. Evaluation performance is pivotal as it asses the achievements the before and after the improvement attempts with an aim reducing future errors. The reduction in both present and future errors are supportive elements that show the importance of the advancements involved in the Six Sigma are essential as they enhance accuracy through the reduction of any involved errors by performance evaluation.
The Six Sigma approach is recommended as it is quite consummate in systems and brings forth desired outcomes. One of the right reason as to why the Six Sigma is recommended is its ability to fit into different contexts of medical variations, and the system has proper accountability and timely identification of errors (Usman Tariq, 2013). Rapid identification of medical errors is essential as it is an asset to many hospitals towards the providence of proper medical services. The Six Sigma further allows one to understand what contributes to errors, which is vital in ensuring that people can receive appropriate medical care as correction of errors becomes at an advanced level irrespective of the variations that might complicate the process of quality healthcare performance (Goldsby, &Martichenko, 2014). Besides, medical errors might be quite misleading as they might skew other involved medical operations that might affect the quality of preventive health provided to different patients. Based on the above reasons, the Six Sigma is a necessary therapeutic approach to ensure that there is the providence of proper medical care.
Existing quality management tools, particularly as these, apply to healthcare settings.
Various tools exist in healthcare settings aimed at the providence of good quality healthcare. One of these prominent tools is the Cost of Quality medical tool (CoQ). The Cost of Quality shows the difference between the associated costs of production, the selling cost and the support to services, where the tool ensures all these costs show proportional cost equivalences if the process had no failures in usage or its production stages (Taylor, &Ranganathan, 2016). The cost of quality can be evaluated in different contexts such as the cost of conformance, which shows the achievement of specified quality standards, the cost of preve...