IR safety round
Improving Quality and Patient Safety by Minimizing Unnecessary Variation

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Quality and safety in health care have proven difficult to precisely define and measure. In other fields, quality is defined as the absence of unnecessary variation and process improvement efforts are gauged by their ability to reduce variation. This article explores how this definition can be applied to various attributes of image-guided procedures.

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Quality and Safety Are Linked

The frequency, severity, and cost of medical errors have made patient safety a high-profile issue (4, 5). Quality and patient safety are clearly linked, as quality errors lead to unsafe practices and procedural complications are often linked to quality lapses. Although process improvement will never yield systems that are completely error-free, we can still strive to decrease the frequency, minimize the burden, and improve the early detection of errors (6).

High-reliability industries such as

Summary

Throughout this series of articles, we have argued that process improvement follows the scientific method whereby one the existing system and makes predictions about how the current process might be improved. Data are collected and compared with those predictions. These data allow one to make an informed decision about whether the evidence supports the prediction or refutes it. Although it may seem cumbersome to collect and analyze data, the alternative is to allow conjecture and emotion to

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    This work was supported in part by the Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) Foundation, Barnes Jewish Hospital Foundation (St. Louis, Missouri), and Siemens Medical Systems (Erlangen, Germany). Neither of the authors has identified a conflict of interest.

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