QUALITY OF OUR CARE AT BAYSIDE

It is very hard for patients to know how good the quality of their medical care is. You can evaluate toasters, cars, and shoes pretty easily. But medical care? You can tell if the office is friendly, if the waiting time is acceptable, and if the practitioners appear to care about you. But it is very hard to tell if you are being advised well on prevention, if the proper tests are being done, or if diagnosis and treatment are appropriate. It’s just hard to tell.

Well, believe it or not, discerning their own quality is hard for practitioners, too. We may think we are doing a good job, but without looking closely, we really can’t tell for sure. In fact, because it’s hard to do, a whole field of study has arisen, called “medical care quality.”

At Bayside, we understand that evaluating and upgrading quality is a difficult proposition. But we also know that the quality of what we do is supremely important to us. We want to serve you as well as we possibly can, and we want to take pride in our work. So we need to take on this difficult task directly.

Here is what we have done. We have made ourselves expert in the field of quality. Budd Shenkin, Bayside’s president, has even written a paper on the subject of quality. Download it here. Then, we have taken many individual steps to heighten our quality, and we continue to take more. You probably won’t notice these when you come to our office, but because we think you deserve to know what we are doing, we are listing lots of the steps we take here in this section of our website.

The Theory of Quality

Before we list all the things we do, we need to talk a little theory.

Quality of care has three parts:

• First, the substance of the care. Are all indicated preventive measures being taken? Are the proper steps taken in diagnosing an illness? Are the proper medicines prescribed? Etc.
• Second, the manner in which care is given. According to the Institute of Medicine, this means: timeliness, patient-centeredness, safety, effectiveness, efficiency, and equitableness.
• Third, helping the individual patient and the community by more than just strictly bio-medical medicine. That is: being compassionate with each patient and forming a “therapeutic alliance,” helping patients find necessary resources, or in short, caring for the patient. In addition, the highest quality practices will contribute to the health of the community by participation.

Improving quality of care can be done in two basic ways:

• Professional enhancement. This means improving the knowledge, skill, and motivation of the clinician.
• Systematic Reengineering. This means improving the system of care, the operating mechanism of the practice within which the clinician performs.

Bayside’s Program of Quality

The most important thing we do at Bayside is to take quality seriously and to look at our quality constantly. Quality of care is one of the most important items on the priority list of our president and our Medical Director. We look at the three sectors of quality carefully and seriously, and we use the two means of intervention available to us.

Here, then, are examples of what we have been doing to push our quality to the highest level.

Finally, let us say this. We would like you to be part of our quality improvement program. If we don’t know it’s broken, we can’t fix it. We solicit your input. What could we do better, and what are your ideas of how we could do it better? Don’t be shy – we need to know.