Quality Assurance Monitoring in Psychiatry

The implementation of quality assurance monitor-ing is an important response to public demands for accountability in medicine as well as a requirement for institutional accreditation by the]oint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (]CAHO). The author examines the somewhat elusive definition of quality as it is applied to medical care. He reviews the history, terminology, and reasons for quality as-surance monitoring and presents the]CAHO-defined concepts of indicators and thresholds. Several common problems associated with the implementation of qual-ity assurance monitoring are discussed along with guidelines for the development of quality assurance indicators in psychiatry. (AmJ Psychiatry 1989; 146:1121-1130