The future role of healthcare quality professionals
Salary survey provides clues
MILWAUKEE, WI – Quality professionals working in the healthcare industry made an average of $85,473 in 2011, reports the American Society for Quality in its annual salary survey, but it’s the job trends that it hints at that offer a glimpse of the future.
The figures presented in the salary survey of quality professionals don’t give the whole story on the healthcare front, said Joseph Fortuna, MD, chair of ASQ’s healthcare division, because the industry definition of a quality professional is not consistent enough right now. A quality professional at one facility may be a nurse but at another facility may be an engineer.
“As we get common definitions for those things, surveys like this will be much more meaningful,” said Fortuna. “You got to start somewhere. I think it’s important to start chronicling this. If we don’t set a high enough level of remuneration for these kinds of professionals, we will end up getting what we pay for. I’m really happy that they did (the survey) because it starts to say OK, we’ve got to look at this level and category of person in healthcare …. we need to look at this function in healthcare – what it is and how it should be reimbursed to ensure quality.”
As the demand for quality professionals increases, so will the salaries for those jobs.
Currently, the demand for quality professionals in healthcare is in the clinical arena, but that will soon change as healthcare reform and the formation of accountable care organizations demand performance standards be set up and met, Fortuna said.
Those sorts of standards “really suggest the presence of people who know about process and process improvement and quality,” he said. “… I think we’re going to need more engineers, people with really high levels of skill in setting up quality management projects but also quality management systems such as ISO 9000 or Baldridge or the Toyota way. … Those are going to be required.”
Putting in and maintaining organizational quality management will spawn a new category of quality professional, Fortuna said: the cultural czar. The cultural czar is the person in an organization who will be responsible for developing and maintaining a culture of excellence and a culture of continuous improvement that allows people to work together for the good of the whole organization, he said.
This type of quality management process based on engineering principles will take some time to be accepted in the healthcare industry, he said. “It’s just not something that has been part of the native lexicon of healthcare, but it has to be in the future or else we’re not going to survive.”
