Improving pediatric cardiac care with continuous quality improvement methods and tools

The healthcare delivery system is overly complex, impersonal and inefficient. Stakeholders are searching for effective remedies to ensure and enable that high quality care is readily available to all no matter their socio-economic standing and their location. High-performing healthcare organizations differentiate themselves by focusing relentlessly and continuously on process-improvement initiatives to advance patient care. Continuous quality improvement offers a powerful way of thinking about how to transform clinical operations and healthcare teams to this end. Quality improvement methods are ideally suited for applications in complex cardiac care. In particular, we find five quality improvement tools—checklists, process maps, Ishikawa diagrams, run charts, and control charts—most relevant to improving the process and outcomes of pediatric cardiac care. The tools help visualize, analyze, and track process and outcome data for both individual and groups of patients. These tools should be taught to healthcare providers and managers and should routinely be deployed by clinicians and healthcare systems to evaluate and improve care.