Implementing Continuous Quality Improvement in Health Care

Curtis P. McLaughlin, D.B.A., is professor emeritus and adjunct professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.' At the time of his retirement he was also Professor of Health Policy and Administration in the Gillings School of Global Public Health and Senior Research Fellow of the Cecil B. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.' Prior to coming to North Carolina, he was Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School and also taught in the Harvard School of Public Health.' He is the author or coauthor of'approximately 275 publications, including Continuous Quality Improvement in Health Care with A.D. Kaluzny, now in its third edition with Jones & Bartlett. He received his BA in Chemistry from Wesleyan University and his MBA and his DBA from Harvard Business School. While there, he studied and'then taught'in the initial Harvard interdisciplinary program in health care economics and management.Julie K. Johnson, MSPH, PhD, is Professor of Surgical Oncology at the Northwestern University FeinbergDr. Johnson's career interests involve building a series of collaborative relationships to improve the quality and safety of health care through teaching, research, and clinical improvement. She has a master's degree in public health from the University of North Carolina and a PhD in evaluative clinical sciences from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.'Since completing her PhD in 2000, Dr. Johnson has focused her research on activities related to quality and safety of patient care and qualitative evaluation of clinical microsystems. She has extensive experience conducting qualitative research as part of implementation research studies and has used qualitative evaluation methods to study errors in ambulatory pediatric settings, to conduct observations in pediatric cardiac surgery, to observe how clinical teams function on inpatient medicine rounds, and to improve handovers of patient care.'