Abstract
Previous chapters have taken a hard look at both the conceptual and the methodological problems of coming to terms with the quality of health care in this era. A variety of study designs and analytic approaches can be used to examine the effects of an intervention program on patient care outcomes, individually and in the aggregate. For example, clinical case management is designed to improve patient care outcomes and to reduce the cost of care. The implementation of case management in hospitals could be based on a variety of study designs. The level of scientific rigor, contingent upon the study design, ranges from a case study to a randomized control trial. The case study only describes the configuration or structure of the case management program. However, little can be said about its cost-effectiveness. However, a clinical trial study design, assigning the intervention randomly to the experimental group with case management and a control group without the intervention, enables the investigator to draw strong causal inferences from the study findings. This chapter explains how causal analysis can be used to evaluate quality improvement programs, using multiple indicators for patient care outcomes.
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Wan, T.T.H., Connell, A.M. (2003). Assessing a Quality Improvement Program: Study Design, Causal Specification and Analysis. In: Monitoring the Quality of Health Care. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1097-0_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1097-0_15
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