H Appointment
Selection for membership in a medical professional staff or to a practitioner panel.
H Appraisal
Initial evaluation by peers of a
... [Show More] practitioner's competency to provide care and services to patients in or for a healthcare origination. Appraisal may include credentialing, privileging, proctoring and appointment.
H Benchmark
A comparative "best" as baseline for improvement.
H Clinical Path
A prospective, detailed, strategic treatment regimen, or daily/intermittent protocol for patient care, designed to identify and integrate key activities, interventions, and services for certain patient conditions. Clinical paths are applicable across the continuum of care, e.g., in acute care form pre-admission and pre-operative treatment through the hospital stay to discharge and post-discharge phases of care, including home care. Clinical/critical paths are designed to include clinical performance criteria for specified time periods of intervals, organized by categories of care needs, e.g., diagnostics, treatments, activity, medications, psychosocial, etc. They are useful tools for measuring actual performance.
H Crisis Management
1) Forecasting potential crisis and planning how to deal with them (proactive) and 2) When a crisis occurs, identifying its full nature, intervening to minimize damage, and recovering (reactive).
H Dephi Technique
A structured communication technique, a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts. The experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator provides an anonymous summary of the experts' forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of their panel. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the "correct" answer. Finally, the process is stopped after a pre-defined stop criterion (e.g. number of rounds, achievement of consensus, stability of results) and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the results.
H Demand Management
Term from economics; in project management it refers to meeting customer expectations; in managed care it refers to influencing access to medical care.
H Disease Management
Disease management is a system of coordinated healthcare interventions and communications for populations with conditions in which patient self-care efforts are significant.
H Ethic
A set of principles of right conduct.
H Ethics
Rules or standards governing conduct.
H Event
An occurrence that is either deemed to be, or results in a significant problem. e.g., sentinel event, adverse event, near miss event.
H E&CF Chart
Events and Causal Factors: Used to find root causes. Combines a flowchart and affinity diagram to identify both the sequence of events and relevant conditions affecting each event.
H Failure Mode
The way a process can fail to function or fail to provide the desired result; an undesirable variation in a process.
H FMEA
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis: A team-based quality improvement tool hat prospectively assesses, identifies, and improves steps in a process to reasonably ensure a safe and clinically desirable outcome [NCPS]: A systematic mechanism to identify and prevent product and process failures before they occur.
H Flowchart
A pictorial representation displaying the actual-sequence of steps and their inter-relationships in a specific process in order to identify hand-offs, inefficiencies, redundancies, inspections, and waiting steps and/or the ideal-sequence of steps, once the actual process is known.
H Force Field Analysis
A change management tool. Looks at forces for and against a change; 1) to decide if the change should be attempted or 2) used to create strategies to increase support and decrease opposition.
H Gantt Chart
Project planning tool for developing schedules; a graphic display of individual parts of a quality improvement process as bars on a horizontal time scale.
H HAI
Healthcare-Associated Infection: Replaces "nosocomial infection" (hospital-acquired) because it implies all health care and is not limited to hospitals. {More general Healthcare-Acquired Conditions {HAC}}
H Iatrogenic
An infection or other complication of treatment induced in a patient by a physician's or other licensed independent practitioner's activity, manner, or therapy.
H Indicator
"Performance Measure": Includes data definitions, as well as numerator and denominator statements, to accurately specify what is being measured.
H Integrated Delivery System - Horizontal
Multi-institutional entity with coordinated functions, activities, or operating units that are at the same stage or segment of the continuum of care, e.g., hospital system.
H Integrated Delivery System - Vertical
A network of entities that provide and coordinate healthcare to a defined population across the entire continuum of care: prevention, ambulatory, subacute, acute, and long term. [Show Less]