3-5 pages NOT including abstract, title, or reference pages

APA Format

Quality Improvement in the Health Care Organization Accreditation

The mandate for improving the way in which health care is delivered was stimulated by the public outcry over the estimated 98,000 deaths because of medical errors each year according to the Institute of Medicine in 1999. Since then, health care organizations have sought means by which the public can be reassured that they were meeting quality and safety standards. Accreditation agencies (e.g., The Joint Commission) and quality awards provide a means for the public to evaluate where the agency is meeting minimum standards.

You have been assigned by your manager to determine which accrediting agencies or quality improvement programs your hospital will utilize in its upcoming revenue cycle. Your hospital is a magnet hospital in a large urban area that provides multilayered services. You have previously used The Joint Commission for your accreditation but feel that you might be better served by using another accrediting body. You have three months in which to gather data and present the information to your manager.

Complete the following for this assignment:

• Choose 3 quality improvement or accreditation-related programs to consider in replacing The Joint Commission for your organization, and briefly describe them. Your agency accepts Medicare and Medicaid payments; therefore, you will need to explore, as background, the conditions of participation for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This is important information because you will need to compare your list of accrediting agencies and quality improvement programs with the conditions of participation to see if they meet the criteria.
• Analyze the costs and benefits of each quality improvement or accreditation-related program by stakeholder group (e.g., patient, provider, and third-party payer).
• Rank your quality improvement or accreditation-related program suggestions with rationale.

Introduction: For this project, you’ll choose a food, such as pizza, or a cuisine, such as Italian cuisine, and then research how four geographic concepts are related to and affect your choice. Instead of presenting your research as a traditional paper, you’ll use PowerPoint or similar presentation software to create an illustrated paper. Your presentation will be structured like a paper, including a title, introduction to the topic, main body, summary and conclusions, and references. Creative use of properly cited graphics and photos from the Internet relevant to your topic is required.

This research assignment is designed to challenge you to be creative as well as demonstrate subject matter knowledge. You are also challenged to learn a new skill/practice an existing skill in applying PowerPoint (or OpenOffice) software to your research. You will not find the “answer” for this assignment in the text or any other single location – this is an integrative assignment that requires you, the student, to create your presentation template and apply your own knowledge on the assigned topic.

You MUST stick to the topic – projects turned in that are not on the topic will not be considered for grading.  This is critical.

First, choose a food item or cuisine that interests you. Some will have more information available about them than others, so it’s worth doing some investigation before you settle on one. In general, any well known national cuisine will have adequate information available, as will widespread food items like hamburgers, pizza, and sushi. If you’re not sure if your desired topic is appropriate, please feel free to ask!

Once you have selected your topic, you will then do research to see how each of the following geographic concepts affects or is related to your topic:

1. Regions
2. Cultural Landscape
3. Diffusion
4. Distance decay

Be sure to address these specific geographic terms and concepts. You don’t need to address them in this order, but you do need to address all of them. You may use “subsets” of these definitions (e.g. contagious diffusion) if such subsets exist. Be sure to refer to your text and glossary to ensure you completely understand these concepts. You should be detailed in your treatment of these concepts – for instance, you should explain both how and why your choice varies by region, and how and why it has been affected by distance decay. Remember that geography, as an academic discipline, seeks to explain why things vary from place to place, not just describe how they do.

Your illustrated paper should be 12 to 15 slides long. You should include a title, an introduction to the topic, a main body that covers how the four geographic concepts relate to your topic, a summary, conclusion, and reference list. You should cite your sources using the citation style appropriate for your field. If you’re not sure what that is, use APA style citations.