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Maine Quality Forum - Your guide to high quality health care
The Maine Quality Forum has been created as part of Dirigo Health. Its mission is to advocate for high quality health care and help each Maine citizen make informed health care choices. To achieve its mission, Maine Quality Forum serves as a clearinghouse of best practices and information to improve health, and acts as an informational resource for health care providers and consumers.
Efforts will include sharing best medical practices with providers and consumers, as well as wellness, health promotion and disease prevention initiatives. Additionally, it will create quality standards and assess needs for new medical technologies throughout the state.
High Quality Health Care - Defined
Maine Quality Forum uses the Institute of Medicine definition of high quality health care as described in the 2001 report, Crossing the Quality Chasm. High quality health care should be:
| • | Safe - avoiding injuries to patients from the care that is intended to help them. |
| • | Effective - providing services based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit and refraining from providing services to those not likely to benefit (avoiding underuse and overuse, respectively). |
| • | Patient-centered - providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions. |
| • | Timely - reducing waits and sometimes harmful delays for both those who receive and those who give care. |
| • | Efficient - avoiding waste, including waste of equipment, supplies, ideas, and energy. |
| • | Equitable - providing care that does not vary in quality because of personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status. |
| Maine Quality Forum Key Tasks | |
| • | Assess medical technology needs throughout the state and inform the Certificate of Need process |
| • | Collect research on health care quality, evidence based medicine and patient safety |
| • | Promote use of best medical practices |
| • | Coordinate efficient collection of health care data - data to be used to assess the health care environment and facilitate quality improvement and consumer choice |
| • | Promote healthy lifestyles |
| • | Promote safe and efficient care through use of electronic administration and data reporting |
