Things Quality Improvement is NOT

Performance Improvement

The terms quality improvement and performance improvement are sometimes used interchangeably. Performance Improvement means a change in the system performance. In Healthcare, this is often used to refer to administrative systems, as contrasted to QI as impacting the actual quality of healthcare.

Example:

The state child health report indicates no well child care is being done in your primary care clinic. You know very well that this isn't true, so you dig deeper to find out where the problem is. You identify a coding error, which led to none of your well child care being registered by the state. And by the way, none of it was paid for either! You promptly work with the administration to correct the related administrative/billing and systems responsible.

The next state health report shows a dramatic improvement in scores. There is nothing affecting actual quality of care that was changed or improved. In this case it was a reporting error that was corrected.