As a future leader in healthcare, you will be engaging with the initiatives, standards, and policies that many of these external stakeholders create. Your assignment for this week asks you to conduct a research-informed literature review exploring how these external stakeholders support a systems thinking approach to promoting maturity along the Quality Continuum (p. 14).

Begin by gathering and assessing a variety of research sources to help you evaluate the connections between oversight organizations, external stakeholders, and a systems approach to quality improvement. Here are some recommendations about where to begin:

• Review the Web Resources page for Chapter Two (p. 31), specifically: Performance Measurement and Accreditation pages on The Joint Commission’s website and CMS Quality Initiatives
• Explore the 2019 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities report sufficiently to understand the current state of healthcare quality and potential implications for improvements
• Read about the successful adoption of Continous Improvement at Thibodaux Regional  
• Conduct your own research discussing the implementation of quality improvement initiatives guided by measures developed with External Stakeholders. 

Gather your research and create an APA 7th Ed. style annotated bibliography with a title page. You will be creating evaluative (sometimes called ‘critical’ or ‘assessing’) annotations. Your evaluative annotation should introduce the topic of the research source and how the content relates to your original research question. Each annotation should be between 100-150 words. 

Your submission should include the sources listed above, as well as at least three additional sources. 

Here are some resources covering annotated bibliographies that can help you format this assignment: 

• Purdue Writing Lab
• Columbia University
• https://www.bibliography.com/apa/developing-an-apa-annotated-bibliography/ 

On a separate page, after your bibliography, write a summary of your findings from the sources you included in your bibliography discussing how external stakeholders support a systems approach to quality improvement in healthcare.

Your assignment must be APA formatted and include at least 1500 words.

Question 2  

This question offers an opportunity to dive into the application of systems theory and thinking by evaluating the system characteristics of dynamic complexity (p. 51) using a scenario. 

Read the case study (Exercise 3.1) on page 52 and discuss the following:

• Which of the five system characteristics are present in this scenario? Use examples to support your answer.
• Imagine you are a Senior Physician at Medical Associates assigned to a newly adopted Quality Improvement committee. You would like to propose an intentional systems thinking approach to addressing these recent challenges since the history of making changes at Medical Associates hasn’t always worked well for everyone. You have been invited to briefly introduce your idea. Which of the three systems models covered in Chapter 3 would you introduce to the group, and why?