Improving the Reliability of Health Care
This white paper describes principles and strategies used successfully in other industries to help evaluate, calculate, and improve the overall reliability of complex systems, and explains the application of reliability principles to health care.
Highlights
- Defining reliability in health care: failure-free operation over time
- Measures of reliability of system performance over time
- A three-step model for applying principles of reliability to health care systems: Prevent, Identify and Mitigate, Redesign
Reliability principles — methods of evaluating, calculating, and improving the overall reliability of a complex system — have been used effectively in industries such as manufacturing to improve both safety and the rate at which a system consistently produces appropriate outcomes.
Applying reliability principles to health care has the potential to help reduce “defects” in care or care processes, increase the consistency with which appropriate care is delivered, and improve patient outcomes.
In IHI's experience working with hospitals to apply reliability principles to care processes, these hospitals use a three-step model for applying principles of reliability to health care systems:
- Prevent failure (a breakdown in operations or functions).
- Identify and Mitigate failure
- Redesign the process based on the critical failures identified.
This IHI white paper offers specific strategies for each step in the model, as well as a template based on this model for increasing reliability of care for heart failure (HF) patients.
How to Cite This Paper:
Nolan T, Resar R, Haraden C, Griffin FA. Improving the Reliability of Health Care. IHI Innovation Series white paper. Boston: Institute for Healthcare Improvement; 2004. (Available at ihi.org)
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