Analysis & commentary: A new quality compass: hospital boards' increased role under the Affordable Care Act.

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 promotes a clinically integrated, systems-based approach to health care. This means coordinating a patient's care over time and across all conditions, diseases, providers, and care settings. The aim is to achieve optimal results in terms of the overall quality of care as well as its efficiency, cost, safety, and timeliness. Hospital boards, which are legally accountable for the quality of the care their institutions provide, need to develop and implement effective quality oversight processes to achieve these objectives. Boards will have to focus less on the competence of individual providers and more on the functioning of the entire system of inpatient and outpatient care. We discuss the increased role of the boards in a systems-based approach to quality, and what steps they can take to meet the quality mandates of the Affordable Care Act.