I have written before the Quality Improvement Organizations (QICs) .The Sept 5, issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine published another study that was unable to clearly demonstrate that their efforts to improve quality in fact improves quality. The accompanying editorial noted that although the study tended to show some rather small improvements in the group that received a quality improvement "intervention", other factors not adequately controlled for could also have been responsible study design and analysis left much to desire. The editorialist quotes a 2006 publication for the Institute of Medicine that noted of 33 recent studies investigating QICs efficacy 9 show positive results, 16 yielded ambiguous results and 8 either found no impact or a negative impact .
Allthough the QIC website proclaims the organization strives to "make sure patients get the right care at the right time" studies-including their own such as this one from the Annals- seem unable to unambiguously demonstrate that what they do improve quality and even when some indication of quality improves (and in the interest of fairness it should be noted that a number of indicators did show improvement) after intervention the studies are so poorly designed they cannot attribute the results to their efforts.
I can't decide if their statement "make sure patients get the right care at the right time" is born of extreme naivete or typical governmental bureaucratic hubris but I think that any physician who has been in practice for more than five minutes would never promise anything so grandiose and impossible to deliver.The QICs seem unable to do something much simpler,namely to show that their interventions actually do what they purport to do but do not loose faith, the authors promise us more and better designed studies.
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