Health Care Quality

I think that one of the major reasons that quality of care is at such a substandard level is because it is not the main priority when patients walk in the door. For many health care providers, simply providing adequate care (at whatever quality that may be) is their primary concern. It's easy for many providers to think "I have a huge case load of patients today, so it's more important I see each and every one of them as opposed to making sure I spend a good amount of time with them, because at least I will have seen them all." But, as we can all imagine, this opens the door wide open for mistakes and due to the lack of thoroughness with each patient, the opportunity to miss crucial elements to the diagnosis process. One of the ways I think this can be remedied is by reducing the case load for these health care providers by hiring more staff. Some physicians have been forced to take on a huge amount of patients every day just to be able to make a decent enough living after having such low reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid as well as having to pay malpractice insurance premiums that continue to rise each year. Understandably, with the economy as bad as it is right now, I only foresee this as happening some time in the future once our economy has taken an upward turn. Another way these issues can be dealt with is to hold the providers more responsible for their actions. If they are penalized for inefficiencies such as putting patients through unnecessary and expensive tests, they are more likely to think twice about what they recommend to each patient. However, this can also have negative effects since providers may be less likely to recommend certain services that could potentially improve the patient's health or even save their life.
I understand good quality of care to be whether or not everything that could have possibly been done for each patient was actually done to improve their health status. I feel that outcome is an unfair measure because even poor outcomes could have been treated with the best quality of care. There is only so much that providers can do and as long as all possible options have been exhausted in each patient's case, they should be able to consider themselves as having been treated with the best quality of care.