Quality management: does it pay off?

Health care today is facing serious quality problems while costs are exploding. Quality management therefore becomes a major strategic challenge. In this article, we go through the strategy deployment and quality management process of the Red Cross Hospital in the Netherlands. Growth, efficiency improvement, and optimizing quality of care were chosen as our main strategic goals. To enable achievement of these goals, we implemented and integrated an ISO 9001:2000 quality management system with Six Sigma, a quality improvement approach from industry. The results of 5 years of quality management illustrated by the scores of a number of performance indicators clearly show that we were able to achieve all our strategic goals. On the basis of our findings, we believe that the combination of ISO 9000 and Six Sigma provides the proper tools to bring health care organizations to a higher level of performance.