Dubai Healthcare City and Harvard Medical International announce Center for Healthcare Planning and Quality

The underlying goal of the CPQ is to support continuous improvement across every aspect of the medical complex. Moving forward, the CPQ will also offer its services in health systems development and professional development to organizations throughout the Gulf Region.

The CPQ, wholly owned by DHCC but operated in tandem by HMI and DHCC, is the result of a committed long-term collaboration between the partners. The organization's charter covers a complexity of roles, from licensing health care providers to operate in Dubai Healthcare City, to setting standards of high-quality care and providing quality training and performance evaluation. The overarching goal of the CPQ, however, is to support the ongoing development of Dubai Healthcare City into a location of choice for health care delivery and ensure that the healthcare services provided at DHCC are comprehensive and aligned with regional demand.

"We are in the unique position of being able to create an infrastructure that will enable all the health care providers within DHCC to play a role in setting new standards of care," said Saeed Al Muntafiq, Chairman of the Board of DHCC. "We are committed to making quality the cornerstone of healthcare delivery at DHCC—not only in concept, but in a formalized infrastructure. Ultimately, we aim to raise the bar for patient care in the broader Gulf Region."

"We began with a mission, to create a center of excellence for healthcare, research and education. The mission is familiar to many, but we are in the fortunate position of being ready to define what words like excellence, accessibility and quality mean in the Gulf Region," added Al Muntafiq.

"At the core of the HMI-DHCC collaboration is a commitment to quality," said Dr. Robert K. Crone, president and chief executive officer of HMI. "To that end, we have made instituting global best practices the major objective of the CPQ, which in turn will enable the health care providers who are part of DHCC to attract patients to their services, as well as top health care professionals to their ranks."

The CPQ will establish benchmarks for quality of care, train professionals within DHCC in quality management, and support mechanisms for monitoring these standards. All health care providers who enter DHCC will be required to meet defined levels of accreditation, and to follow steps to continually improve quality as laid out in the CPQ's quality infrastructure. Ongoing continuing medical education will be an integral part of efforts to empower health care organizations that join the medical complex to meet international standards of excellence. HMI and DHCC are already providing this, through programs like the Practi-Med series, which gives health care professionals in the region access to a broad range of medical knowledge impacting their practice.