Quality assurance.

Abstract

Modern health care is changing--we have more chronic disease, increasing demands for documentation from government and legal bodies, and greater emphasis on disease screening and prevention. Quality assurance is important in developing health care services to meet these changing needs because it provides standards by which we can measure the activities involved in the delivery of health care, and quality assurance programmes are more likely to ensure that the predefined standards of health care are being met. This paper provides: (i) an acceptable definition of quality assurance (QA); (ii) an explanation of why we need it; (iii) evidence that the medical decision-making process is failing under the modern technological advances; and (iv) guidelines for meeting future health care standards by using the modern technological tools of computers and computer software to support the beleaguered clinical decision-making process.