The Public Health Accreditation Board standards are the foundation for the Missoula City-County Health Department (MCCHD) Performance Management (PM) system. Quality Improvement (QI) is a component of the PM system. As part of PM, staff set baseline measures and develop goals and targets for their programs. We then gather data to track how we are doing. When we are not going in the right direction to meet our goals, we initiate QI projects.

Armstrong and Baron (1998)  define the activities of a health-related PM system:

• Communicate a vision of its objectives to all its employees.
• Set department, unit, team and individual performance targets that are related to wider objectives.
• Conduct a formal review of progress towards these targets.
• Use the review process in order to improve effectiveness
  Evaluate the whole process in order to improve effectiveness.
• Define a managerial structure to look after all the characteristics above, so that individual staff and managers are assigned to specific responsibilities to manage the PM System.

In addition, PM organizations:

• Express performance targets in terms of measurable outcomes, accountabilities and training/learning targets.
• Use formal appraisal procedures as ways of communicating performance requirements that are set on a regular basis.