Final answer:
Quality assurance is the process of monitoring and evaluating patient care quality in healthcare facilities. It encompasses peer review and risk management and relates to ensuring privacy and effectiveness in healthcare treatments, considering cost, quality, and privacy concerns.
Step-by-step explanation:
The process of monitoring and evaluating the quality of care and services provided to patients in a healthcare facility is called quality assurance. This involves a systematic process of ensuring that healthcare services meet certain predefined standards and are consistently delivered to maintain a high level of patient care. Quality assurance can involve several strategies and mechanisms, including peer review, where healthcare professionals assess each other's work to ensure it meets professional standards, and risk management, which seeks to identify and mitigate potential risks to patient safety and privacy.
Developing policies that balance various aspects of healthcare provision can be complex. When dealing with the sharing of digital health records, questions that must be addressed include: How can healthcare providers balance the necessity of sharing patient information for better care coordination against the need to protect patient privacy? How do the costs of new treatments and technologies factor into decisions about care, while still considering patient outcomes and quality of life? What mechanisms can be implemented to minimize the risk of adverse selection in insurance markets?