The Quality letter for healthcare leaders最新文献

A new 60-chart report prepared for the Commonwealth Fund on the health of Medicare beneficiaries shows many signs of progress-especially in areas that have been targeted as national priorities such as mammography, inpatient treatment of heart attacks, and outpatient care of diabetes. However, noticeable gaps and deficiencies in care, along with great variations in healthcare quality, still exist nationwide.

Many problems in the healthcare system mirror the structure of a competition in which the participants divide--and sometimes destroy--value instead of creating it, according to a recent study. Some healthcare leaders say that these problems can be dealt with by emphasizing accountability throughout a healthcare organization.

When it comes to quality in healthcare delivery, much has emerged about best practices-backed up by scientific data. But the results still are not there, the director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Carolyn Clancy, MD, said at a recent healthcare quality summit sponsored by the agency. Instead, the healthcare community has to challenge itself to do better.

Hospital Compare Gets Official Rollout by CMS After almost 2 1/2 years of planning and discussion, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Hospital Quality Alliance officially rolled out the "Hospital Compare" website last month. With it, healthcare professionals and consumers can compare parameters of healthcare quality at most hospitals.

The idea of paying for performance is not new. Over the years, various health plans, employer-payer coalitions, and now even the federal government have been exploring and initiating ways to recognize and financially reward providers for improving the care they provide. But in recent weeks, this issue seems to have taken on a new sense of urgency--with an emphasis on quality. This issue of The Quality Letter for Healthcare Leaders looks at where pay-for-performance is coming from and what healthcare organizations are going to have to do to pay for quality. Highlighted is a new "survival guide" on how CEOs--and entire healthcare organizations--can better tackle performance measurement.

Reexamining Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare: Is Unequal Treatment Disappearing? Three years ago, the Institute of Medicine released a report, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, which said that even when insurance, income, and age were comparable, sharp disparities in healthcare could be found between what members of minority groups receive and the care that the white, non-Hispanic majority gets. Several new studies examine if much has been changing.

Recent studies and discussions are shining a new light on how better communication can lead to better patient outcomes, improved patient safety, improved morale, and reduced turnover, especially among nursing staffs. While it is a seemingly simple idea on the surface, the issue must surmount years of entrenched-and sometimes disrespectful-behavior that sometimes has caused patients to receive less-than-optimum clinical care.

Evidence-based medicine has been used to guide healthcare that works, but sometimes, the system delivers care that ends up too little, too much, or just wrong. Participants at a Washington, DC, forum looked recently at what can be done to make a smoother path to the most effective set of practices that improve healthcare quality.