Economics and finance in medical quality management

Abstract

Improvements in medical care and its delivery comes at a price. Quality professionals are tasked with assessing the value of the programs they implement and, for their superiors, whether that value is worth the cost of completing the program. They need to present the results in a convincing and clear way. The value of quality must be condensed into understandable and relatable economic terms that the organization and society as a whole will understand and accept. This chapter reviews the fundamentals of economics, finance, and politics of medical quality and illustrates how these three fields interact and can be used by the reader to prepare and defend the business case for quality. The information within this chapter is intended to introduce basic concepts that can be useful regardless of which direction the system will move in the next 5 years.