Kellogg grant fuses quality and delivery: a prototype program to fit many settings.

Just as any business enterprise involving many personal interactions, group practice medicine can suffer from organizational parallax, narrowed by time, and resulting from one-sided views of its own decision-making. Indeed, that is why accreditation reviews of groups take into account broad happenings within a medical practice as observed by outsiders. Aside from the all-important medical record, source materials for such reviews include questionnaires on the logical processes of care, educational activities of the staff in all departments, technological support, ethical considerations and overall environment. This article takes a look at quality assurance-in an innovative form--within group practice. The type of program detailed in it was first put to the test in 1975, by the St. Louis Park Medical Center, Minneapolis, in conjunction with a grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to St. Louis Park, and to the Minneapolis-based firm InterStudy.