Twenty Years Later: Do We Have an Agreed-Upon Definition of Health Quality Management?

Since the Institute of Medicine's report in the USA in 1999 and the Baker-Norton report in Canada in 2004, academics have studied quality in areas such as governance, process improvement, measurement, patient engagement, physician and staff engagement and finance. Few, however, have offered a formal definition for their area or integrated each area's underlying assumptions to offer a shared definition of quality. This paper summarizes selected literature in each area, analyzes their contributions and compares common strands between each area to build a single integrated definition of health quality management which managers can apply in their health setting.