From chaos to order: health care quality in context.

Quality underlies diverse efforts to repair the troubled health care system, yet the many abstract definitions offered are not particularly useful. A better approach is to evaluate quality in an applied or situational context. This article offers six propositions that establish such a context and explain why the current health care environment is so volatile. Some parallels between health care and the emerging field of science called chaos theory are drawn as a possible future basis for recognizing order in the health care system.