1. Cost, Quality, and Access

what are the most important issues in balancing cost, quality, and access in health care?

2. What's involved in quality improvement? 

It is very easy to support the idea of improving our healthcare system. It is very hard to actually carry-out an actual improvement project.

There are many reasons for this difficulty, including improvement means changing how we do things – and most of us don’t like to change.

To better explore the issues surrounding trying to improve healthcare, this week’s discussion is a little different.

Instead of focusing on discussing a specific question, this week’s focus is on keeping a running diary on our Discussion Board about actually changing something - for real. 

More specifically, I charge you with documenting doing something, big, medium, or small in your own life that is designed to improve your own personal health.  

I encourage you to use all the materials and websites I provided this week; I think you'll find them useful in doing the activity.  I especially recommend you look at the Escape Fire First Aid Kit to help you with ideas for your improvement project.

There are five parts to this week’s project:

One:  Identify something about your current health status that needs improvement. For example, you might select drinking more water, eating more fruits and vegetables, and cutting down on fast foods. Or maybe you choose a more ambitious area for improvement like joining a gym, walking 10,000 steps a day, or making some other significant change in your overall lifestyle to improve your general health status.

Two:  After you select what you are planning on improving, the next step is to identify exactly what you will need to do in order to make this change really happen in your real life. 

So for example, if your change is to increase the number of fruits and vegetables you eat each week, then what, exactly, will you need to do to make that happen?  As you think through your planned change, you will then see that maybe you will need to shop in a different way, maybe spend more time on food preparation, or convince others that you may cook vegetables for them to eat too, etc.

Three:  After you identify your implementation plan, the next step is to implement it.

Four:   After implementing you plan, your next step is to determine whether or not your plan is working, and if needed, revise it so it works better. As part of this assessment, you should identify unexpected barriers to successful implementation and what you will do to address those issues.

Fifth:  The last step is to determine how much change you were actually able to accomplish by the end of class time this week

Given this project schedule, it is important that you start immediately.