ASQ Works Toward Quality in Healthcare Reform

ASQ developed a set of basic principles for bringing quality methods into the healthcare reform efforts in the United States, and sent them to the legislators working on healthcare reform legislation. 

ASQ’s healthcare reform white paper focuses heavily on steps for improving the process of care. Process improvement offers the potential to free up resources to meet the wide-ranging aims of healthcare reform in the United States.  There is also an executive summary that provides highlights from the white paper. The ASQ Healthcare Division developed the white paper as part of ASQ’s advocacy efforts in Washington, D.C.

The white paper was presented to members of Congress during meetings on Capitol Hill on July 16 and 17.  During the same week, ASQ representatives also met with the American Health Quality Association to discuss healthcare reform.  ASQ’s Public Policy Advisory Council planned and coordinated these meetings.

The white paper urges that healthcare reform legislation address the development, evaluation, testing, and deployment of valid measures and metrics for evaluation of the non-clinical, operational performance and efficiency of healthcare providers.  It calls for the use of proven process improvement tools for analysis and evaluation of operational wastes, poor sustainability, poor transferability, and other functional or operational process deficiencies. The paper also discusses training healthcare stakeholders in these methodologies.

Five areas of healthcare reform most in need of this kind of attention are singled out in the paper:

1. Waste
2. Incentive alignment
3. Information technology implementation
4. Sustainable culture change
5. Workforce education.

Representatives of ASQ presented the white paper to staff members from the offices of Congressmen Xavier Becerra (D-CA), Brett Guthrie (R-KY), and Bill Pascrell (D-NJ). Becerra and Pascrell are members of the Health Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee; Guthrie sits on the Health Subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee. 

ASQ representatives will continue to take this message to other legislators and policy makers who are playing key roles in the debate over healthcare reform.