Patient Safety

Is Quality Care A Dinosaur?

Yes. No. Maybe? Not Yet. Who knows? One thing that holds some degree of certainty is this - preventing quality care's possible extinction may well depend on physicians being willing to openly demonstrate to patients and other healthcare professionals their ability to provide superior outcomes.

Validating results with measurable data is emerging as a valid answer to the constraints imposed by third parties on quality care issues and physician incomes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the initiatives taken by major healthcare institutions and individual practices to promote their capabilities directly to patients via positive and competitive marketing campaigns. Marketing - once the outcast step child may, if invited to the party, save the day for healthcare.

The competitive stand taken by these prestigious institutions and private practitioners using results oriented, patient education marketing, is paving the way for an eventual mandate requiring all doctors to take CME credits in "patient safety" - another step that will go a long way to promote quality care, highlight its important place in the future of medicine, and prevent it from going the way of the dinosaur.