The interface of quality management and the hospital information department.

Hospital leadership, the Joint Commission, third-party payors, health care researchers, and others are repeatedly recognizing the essential role of information management in their quality improvement objectives. The health information department must become more proactive in its acknowledgment of these responsibilities by instituting the continuous quality improvement model. This model will prevent proactiveness from turning into mere reactiveness. As suggested by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline, "all too often, 'proactiveness' is reactiveness in disguise. If we simply become more aggressive fighting the 'enemy out there,' we are reacting--regardless of what we call it. True proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems."