Shaking off illness.

Wellness accounts for billions of dollars in services, products, research and development, technology and labor hours. Often thought of as being separate from health care, the business of wellness has become an industry in itself with lush promises, brands and prominent advocates who travel the world, professing solutions for the body and mind.

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In its literal definition, the term means prevention of illness and preservation of life. So why is wellness only synonymous with health care when insurance providers, regulators and the 580,000 hospitals that make up the industry are credited for doing a good job? What about the product manufacturers, quality teams, laboratory workers and ambulance drivers?

Patients, otherwise those on the receiving end of health care (including the healing modalities and services categorized under "wellness"), are left out of the assessment. Sometimes care gets lost in the language of regulations, organizational structures, ERPs and PPOs. Academy Health has recognized this and recently teamed up with The Commonwealth Fund to set new standards for the U.S. health care sector. The team selected nine state teams to participate in the State Quality Improvement Institute, which aims to help performance across targeted quality indicators. Targeting wellness, the four guideposts that the participants will build their efforts on are quality, access, efficiency and equity.

The states were selected for their commitment, leadership and resources necessary to build on previous success and conceptualize and implement substantive new quality improvement efforts.

For many health systems workers, the basis of medicine is as simple as the oath that physicians take to help people live their best. As in other professions, they have to manage government regulations and cut costs, errors and wait times, but the mission goes much further in two examples described in this issue--children's preventative care at Children's National Medical Center (page 24) and medical device manufacturing at Beckman Coulter (page 39). The common goal is patient care.

To ensure optimum care, the companies take very different paths. Children's National Medical Center follows eight quality checkpoints. Beckman Coulter functions through The Power of Process and an entrepreneurial spirit, a combination established by the founders decades before the State Quality Improvement Institute and other organizations were designed to look out for patients.

To reach me, e-mail ccross@iienet.org or call (770) 349-1110

Candi S. Cross

Managing Editor