CONTINUOUS QUALITY IMPROVEMENT
Continuous quality improvement (CQI), also
known as total quality management (TQM), is
another way of improving quality that is slowly being
introduced into health care. CQI, developed and
extensively used in industry with great success, com-bines a scientific methodology with a management
philosophy of improving processes continuously. It is
based on the knowledge that statistical information
(ie, data) can be derived from manufacturing (and
other) processes; therefore, statistical methods can be
used to analyze this data, characterizing any process
and ultimately limiting the inappropriate variation
that exists in it. This methodolog