Quality Improvement: First Steps

Once you have explored any of these methods, you will probably have a list of several problem areas in your practice, as well as a few ideas about how you might make changes. You now need to put those ideas onto paper and create a list of the potential changes that you could initiate in your practice. Your goal at this point is not to work out the details of a solution but simply to generate thoughtful ideas about how you might address each problem area. (In part two in this series, we’ll dig deeper into these issues using some common quality improvement tools, such as flowcharts and control charts.) A sample list of change projects aimed at specific problems might look like this: