Continuous Quality Improvement

As you know, if you have played with designing on the web, there is no Final Stage, no conclusion, no time when the site is final. If you have any creativity in your soul, the site always be improved. You take a break when your wife needs you to help out with the kids, or your practice demands your attention, or you just need to go fishing. But you always come back, because a site is never finished.

CQI, as I am sure you know, stands for continuous quality improvement. The term and concept has been borrowed from the manufacturing industry, which found that making quality improvement a continuous activity, rather than something you do once a year or only if something goes wrong, produced much better results. This concept has been brought over to the medical industry (or at least the hospital side of it), with somewhat mixed results. Some of us think that it is just a way to do things cheaper, which was not the goal when it was developed in the manufacturing industry. However, if properly applied, it can yield some very good results. We try to practice it in my office.

The networked economy and the connected world are rapidly changing. Your goals for the site will be changing and growing, the resources available from the professional societies and the for-profit medical sites will be changing, and your site needs to change with them.

Do you have a physician website? Let me know about it and it may help me to make this chapter better. 

Also, please send your comments about this chapter of the Orthopedist's Guide to the Internet to David Nelson. Thank you.