Customer Reviews

The Best Practice: How the New Quality Movement is Transforming Medicine

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is my favorite example of a visionary solution since reading How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business by Hubbard. Kenney's work would have been a great example for Hubbard and Hubbard's methods would have solved many of the challenges of Donald Berwick and Paul Batalden, the heroes of The Best Practice.

Whether the average patient can tell it or not, the quality of health care is improving measurably thanks largely to a passionate devotion of Berwick and Batalden to their cause. The biggest surprise for me in the book is how even a culture as entrenched as medicine can start to change its ways when quality becomes a quantity that is measured and used as a yardstick for improvement. Champions of the quality control methods W.E. Demming developed for other businesses, Berwick and Batalden decide to implement standards of quality already known in other professions to perhaps the profession perhaps most resistant to objective measurement. And we are all better off for it.

Very readable, but greatly simplified overview of the health care quality improvement movement. Takes as its center the vision of Don Berwick's Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Unfortunately, while a central tenet of the quality movement is that depending upon heroic performance of individuals is a way to ensure error and mistake, the book takes a heroic approach to the movement itself painting the leading lights as paragons. Doesn't dig deep enough to offer an account of the inertia of healthcare and our nation's failures of cost and quality.

There is some very interesting information in there, things I really had no idea were happening (like studying Toyota to reduce medical errors). Considering I work on the other side of things, actually seeing patients, I feel like this work hits some important points, but perhaps not the most pressing and direct issues that impair providers from providing excellent care every time.

Jessica Sims

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This is an excellent resource for health care providers in highlighting the many changes that can help revise the health care system and ensure a high quality of care.

An excellent review of the history of the quality improvement movement in America. Easy to read, informative, and concise. I highly recommend it for anyone who involved in health care administration. It would be an excellent introduction into the QI process for hospital board of directors. Jim Slavin

Book is well written and easy to read. Provides a history and description of the quality movement over the past few decades. The stories of the leaders like Don Berwin were very helpful to others who are trying to increase the quality of health care.

The book stresses issues in hospital quality that can be translated to the outpatient setting but would have been helpful to have more stories related to outpatient care.

Ed Shahady MD

The Best Practice by author and consultant Charles Kenney clearly shows us what many healthcare organizations in this country are doing right! There are a growing number of individuals who have made a commitment to see that patient care is not only safe but affordable and of the highest quality. He describes the project taken on by Dr. Donald Berwick and Blanton Godfrey where they sign on some of the leading hospitals in the country to put together teams that consisted of top physicians as well as hospital administrators. The goal was to select a problem, get to the root cause and then find a remedy. The main purpose: to determine if the tools that are used in other industries to achieve top performance could be used in our healthcare system and achieve similar results. The project was an overwhelming success and Kenney's description of the people involved and their dedication to discovering ways to accomplish their goals is both inspirational and moving.

Charles Kenny writes with the thoroughness and objectivity of an experienced journalist. He chronicles the Quality and Safety Movement in Medicine that was too long in coming, and applauds those who overcame the medical culture of infallibility and mind-your-own-business laissez faire in patient care. After reading this, others are now inspired to alter our "deny and defend" legal culture that litigates stressfully then settles claims in secret, so no lessons can be learned and Medicine is not made better. The Veritas Lex Medicus project promotes honest and efficient resolution with just compensation for real medical error.

A great historical review of the quality movement and leaders within healthcare who have been successful as leaders in the quality movement. Informative and well written, quick read.

I think Mr Kenney offers an honest and somewhat optimistic take on the health care challenges facing our country. There are certain hurdles to overcome, but the modeling of "best practices" and the new reliance on technology-driven solutions offers some room for optimism.