Patient Quality Measures: The Necessary Paradigm Shifts in Medicine.
Improving patient quality measures is a complex task. It involves more than simply telling caregivers to adopt new practices. Rather, it uses current research and tools to bring about creating changes in workplace attitudes, building teamwork among healthcare providers, and converting evidence based data into actual practice. There are many tools that physicians can use to change practice and improve on quality measures.
Heart Research – Open Journal is one such tool. This electronic journal is an open access scholarly journal, dedicated to making accessible medical information and research to a wide variety of healthcare individuals. We welcome everyone to our first journal and hope that is a valuable resource for the future. In this edition I am going to discuss changing role of physicians in medical practices as new research and therapy directs us towards better patient care. I will use one particular example that I am very familiar with, and this is the practice of transradial cardiac catheterization.
In 2012 my colleague, Dr. Morton Kern, and I wrote an editorial on the lack of adaption of the transradial technique in the United States. We discussed Kurt Levinās āUnfreeze, Change
and Re-freezeā theory. In the early twentieth century social psychologist Kurt Lewin identified
three stages of change that are still the basis of many strategies for managing change.
He suggested that change involves a move from one static state via a state of activity to another static status quo via a three-stage process: unfreezing, changing and re-freezing. This freeze change
model recognized that people like the safety, comfort and the feeling of control within their environment.
Heart Res Open J. 2014; 1(1): e1-e2. doi: 10.17140/HROJ1-e001
