Quality. (Executive Briefing).

With the sharp focus on reducing medical errors, books and articles on quality are a dime a dozen. Figuring out which ones to read can be a challenge. Here's what some ACPE leaders in the Quality Resource Center and various Forums recommend.

"My candidate for the seminal article on quality is 'Quality Comes Home,"' says John C. Babka, MD, FACHE, FACP, CPE, FACPE.

"Quality Comes Home" (Berwick, D, Annals Int. Med. 125(10):839-43, Nov 15, 1996) describes the author's philosophy and several concepts necessary for clinical process improvement.

"Organizations and groups that can understand and internalize these concepts will almost certainly be successful," Babka says.

Mark Bloomberg, MD, MBA, CPE, FACPE, adds another Berwick article to the list: "Continuous Improvement As An Ideal In Health Care" (New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 320, pp. 53-56, Jan 5, 1989.)

"Written when many believed it wasn't possible to measure quality in health care, Berwick's easily read and understood article explained how the quality could be measurably improved by a systematic approach to monitoring specific health care indicators," Bloomberg says.

Another article described as a "must read" by Max M. Cohen, MD, MHSA, FACS, CPE, FACPE is "The Quality of Care. How Can It Be Measured?" (Donabedian, A. JAMA 1988; 260:1743-8.)

Cohen says the article is a review of quality by the "father of health care quality measurement."

For a take on quality from the industrial point of view, Barry Silbaugh, MD, MS, FACPE, suggests "No Toyotas in Health Care: Why Medical Care Has Not Evolved to Meet Patients' Needs" (Health Affairs, Nov/Dec 2001, pp. 44-56).

Written by Molly Joel Coye, CEO, Health Technology Center in San Francisco, and participant in the 2001 IOM Report, the article outlines barriers, obstacles and public policy problems preventing health care's adoption of industrial strength quality improvement techniques that work remarkably well in companies such as Toyota.

"If you've been puzzled or frustrated by the lack of innovation, reliability and consistency in health care -- when we see it so abundantly in other industries -- this article can help you understand why, and what can be done about it," Silbaugh says.