AHRQ NAC Subcommittee on Children's Healthcare Quality Measures for Medicaid and CHIP Programs

What is health care quality? Leading complementary definitions/frameworks

• 1990—"The degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge."¹
• 1999 - "Doing the right thing for the right person at the right time in the right way."²
• 2001—A high quality health care system is one in which care is reliably Safe, Timely, Effective, Efficient, Equitable and Patient-centered (STEEP).³
• Notes:
   —   Bullets one and two are clinician-focused; by 2001—explicitly system-focused.
   —   All are aspirational.

¹  Institute of Medicine (IOM), Medicare: A Strategy for Quality Assurance, 1990, p. 21
²  Eisenberg, Testimony to Congress, 1999.
³  IOM, Crossing the Quality Chasm, 2001.