Quality in healthcare can be understood from two key perspectives:
- Quality as a proactive approach: This involves continuous efforts to improve care outcomes before problems arise. Proactive quality measures focus on holistic assessments, personalized care plans, regular monitoring, and patient engagement to prevent health issues and enhance overall health status. It aims at preventing adverse events, optimizing health, and providing coordinated, value-based care over time.
- Quality as a reactive approach: This refers to measuring how well healthcare providers comply with established quality standards after care delivery or events have occurred. Reactive quality management detects deviations, errors, or failures based on compliance data, audits, and performance metrics to correct issues and ensure safety and standards adherence.
Hence, quality as a proactive approach aims to improve care by preventing problems and customizing care, while quality as a reactive approach measures compliance with standards and addresses issues after they occur.
