Implementing a continuous quality improvement program in a community hospital.

Hospitals and other health care institutions have been slow to adopt some of the quality innovations developed in manufacturing. The growing literature on these methods includes few specifics on how to implement the process in health care institutions. This article describes a single community hospital's implementation of the Hospital Corporation of America's Hospitalwide Quality Improvement Process, a model developed from the Deming method of statistics-based continuous quality improvement. The article addresses common questions about implementation, citing both examples of success and areas of difficulty.