11/05/2026
The Fishbone Diagram—also known as the Ishikawa Diagram or the Cause-and-Effect Diagram—is a fundamental tool in healthcare quality management for identifying the root causes of a specific problem.
According to the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) and its HQ Solutions framework, it is most effective during a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) because it forces a team to look beyond the obvious symptoms and investigate the systems-level failures.