Creating Capacity for Improvement in Primary Care: The Case for Developing a Quality Improvement Infrastructure

Committed to strengthening the role of primary care in a high-value health care system and energized by the potential of the patient-centered medical home, many practitioners, purchasers, and quality improvement (QI) organizations are focused on improving the quality and safety of primary care services. This work benefits from the experiences of hospitals, which have institutionalized a culture of QI over the past several decades, and other large organizations such as integrated delivery systems, which, like hospitals, have the resources and economies of scale to make robust QI investments.