Overview
Quality improvement is the systematic, continuous effort to enhance the performance, safety, and effectiveness of processes, products, or services by measuring current practice, identifying gaps, testing changes, and embedding those that yield better outcomes. In healthcare it applies structured methods, often framed by Donabedian's distinction between structure, process, and outcome, and by iterative cycles of planning, action, and measurement, to raise the reliability and value of care while reducing waste, variation, and harm. The approach depends on clear aims, valid measurement, stakeholder engagement, and data systems capable of tracking change over time. Research in this area evaluates the effectiveness of quality-improvement strategies in mid-level private healthcare facilities using a Donabedian model-based approach, and reports quality-improvement projects targeting sleep, including a multidisciplinary music-therapy initiative and a controlled trial of an intervention for sleep quality. Studies of routine viral-load monitoring describe the lessons of building quality data systems in a large clinic, while work on improving the screening and management of obesity in urgent care illustrates the application of improvement methods to clinical processes. Analyses of adverse events drawn from surgical quality datasets reflect the measurement of outcomes that improvement efforts seek to influence. Together these threads frame quality improvement as a data-driven, cyclical discipline for strengthening the structures, processes, and outcomes that determine service performance and patient care.
Research published in this journal
9 peer-reviewed articles, ranked by relevance. Each links to its DOI.
How this research is being cited
The 9 articles above have been cited 33 times in the scholarly literature. Citation data via OpenAlex and Crossref, updated Jun 2026.
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H. Adhiambo et al. · 2025 · PLOS Global Public Health
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2025 · PLOS Global Public Health
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2024 · Journal of Sleep And Sleep Disorder Research
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2024 · Journal of Sleep And Sleep Disorder Research
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2024 · medRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
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A. Waljee et al. · 2022 · Gut
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2022 · Brain Sciences
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2022 · Journal of Pain Research
A sample of recent works citing this journal's research on Quality Improvement, linking to each citing work.