Regione Lombardia: a tool for improving quality in hospitals.

Introduction: The regional healthcare system of the Lombardy Region pay great attention to monitoring the effectiveness and quality level with which its services. The aim of this paper is to describe the method adopted by the Lombardy Region to create a governance tool for the healthcare system that would be applied within hospitals to create value at financial-economic level, to achieve continuous quality improvement and to increase patient/customer satisfaction levels. It was called: Piano Integrato del Miglioramento dell'Organizzazione (PIMO), i.e. Integrated Plan for Hospital Improvement. Metods: The approach for the definition of the PIMO was based on: the Plan Do Check Act methodology; the management requirements introduced by the UNI EN ISO 9001:2008 and UNI EN ISO 9004:2005 standards; the regulations and indications made for the Public Administration; the Guidelines for planning and monitoring improvement proposed by the CAF (Common Assessment Framework). Results: The evaluation of the scores for all the health structures shows a good level of quality and qualifies PIMO as a strategic tool for hospitals. Conclusions: It will be necessary to allow this tool to operate for some time in order to make an overall assessment of the results achieved.