Giving Compass' Take:

• Stanford Social Innovation Review highlights 10 pitfalls and promising practices drawn from experimentation with quality-improvement methods and performance management in health care.

• How can these lessons help to scale access to healthcare and related services? 

• Learn why basic necessities like food and shelter are essential to healthcare. 

For more than a century, the American health care sector has wrestled with the question of how best to improve the quality of the care it provides. Countless reports, commissions, government regulations, and accrediting bodies have sought to introduce basic standards of practice, and improve outcomes for patients across the United States. In the last 30 years, in particular, providers, payers, purchasers, and patients themselves have joined in a global “quality-improvement movement,” broadly applying a variety of modern management methods (including Lean, Six Sigma, and Continuous Quality Improvement) in pursuit of progress. While results have been decidedly mixed, the field has made some advances while learning a great deal about the best use of these approaches.

  1. Avoid Systems Myopia
  2. Start With the Customer
  3. Track Rate of Learning
  4. Emphasize Adaptation, Not Fidelity
  5. Design Measurement Systems for the Front Line First
  6. Embrace Nuance in Evaluation
  7. Live in the Field
  8. Understand the Psychology of Change
  9. Approach Payment Incentives With Caution
  10. Address Inequity Proactively

Read the full article about lessons from health care on quality improvement by Joe McCannon, Pedro Delgado & Maureen Bisognano at Stanford Social Innovation Review.