Quality Is Love

Before Avedis Donabedian, there was no systematic way to know if a hospital was saving patients or killing them.

He fixed that. His 1966 paper created the framework: structure, process, outcomes. Every quality dashboard in healthcare runs on it. Infection rates. Patient outcomes. Readmission scores. All of it traces back to his model.

Measure the inputs. Measure the process. Measure the results. Improve what the numbers reveal. Measure again.

The loop worked. Quality improved. So the loop kept running.

More metrics. More dashboards. More frameworks built on frameworks. The system measured itself measuring itself. The original question was simple. Is this patient getting good care? It disappeared inside the machinery designed to answer it.

Donabedian died in 2000. His last word on quality:

"The secret of quality is love. You have to love your patient, you have to love your profession, you have to love your God. If you have love, you can then work backward to monitor and improve the system."

The inventor of the quality dashboard didn't reject his life's work. He named its ceiling.

Measurement can tell you what happened. It cannot tell you why it mattered.

The loop runs. The dashboards glow. And the thing they were built to protect quietly leaves the building.

Go deeper: Dashboard Blindness