For Patients
What is quality health care?
According to the Institute of Medicine, (Crossing The Quality Chasm, 2001), quality health care means treatment and care that are:
- Safe - Avoiding injuries to patients from the care that is intended to help them.
- Effective - Providing services based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit and refraining from providing services to those not likely to benefit (avoiding under-use and overuse).
- Patient-centered - Providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values, and ensuring that patient's values guide all clinical decisions.
- Timely - Reducing waits and sometimes harmful delays for both those who receive and those who give care.
- Efficient - Avoiding waste, including waste of equipment, supplies, ideas, and energy.
- Equitable - Providing care that does not vary in quality because of personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, geographic location, and socio-economic status.
Although we would like to think that every doctor, hospital, or health plan gives high-quality care, research shows this is not always so. Experts across the United States agree that health care quality can vary from hospital to hospital and region to region. This variation in quality is a problem for our nation's health care system.
There are many reasons for this variation. For one, health care is complex and always changing. It seems that every day brings new technologies and new understanding, but our system falls short in putting these new ways of care into practice safely and evenly across the country. In addition, patient diversity and a complicated system of payment and accountability have made quality measurement difficult.
As more people suffer from chronic conditions like diabetes, asthma, or heart disease, communication and coordination among patients, caregivers, hospitals, and insurers become even more important. Unfortunately, physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers often work independently and do not share information about the patient's condition, treatment, or history. As medical science and technology advance and patient needs become more complex, the need for standard measurements of health care quality is more important than ever.
The information you can find on this website is helping to create standards for measuring and reporting health care quality. By using this information, you are encouraging better quality health care for you, your family, and for patients in the future.
How is health care quality measured?
Health professionals have many different ways to measure quality of care. A quality "measure" is usually information from a patient's record that is converted into a number, rate, or percentage that shows how well health care providers took care of that patient. Most quality measures are "evidence-based," that is, based on the best available evidence from research studies and other controlled tests, as well as upon a patient's unique situation. Health care quality measurement is a new science and takes a lot of time, information, and analysis. For that reason, the measures available today cover only some of the most common conditions. New measures are being developed all the time. Many public and private groups are working to improve and expand health care quality measures, to make these measures more reliable and helpful to consumers in making health care choices.
What clinical topics or conditions are measured on this website?
The quality measures on the website fall into four major clinical areas: heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, and prevention of health care associated infections. The initial Progress & Performance Report focuses on these areas as they represent some of the most common and most commonly measured services hospitals provide. Because measuring health care quality is costly and difficult to produce, a limited number of conditions, treatments, and procedures are included, but more will be added in the near future.
Where can I get more quality information?
Other measures of quality not provided on this site at this time may be available for a particular hospital at one or more of the following sites:
- Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council: This is an independent state agency responsible for addressing the problem of escalating health costs, ensuring the quality of health care, and increasing access for all citizens regardless of ability to pay.
- Hospital Compare: This federal government-run site offers data on quality and timeliness of care.
- The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality: Also run by the federal government, this site has data on mortality rates and quality of care measures.
- The Leapfrog Group: This nonprofit organization provides data on patient safety.
- Quality Check: This site, run by the independent nonprofit The Joint Commission, provides data on timeliness and quality of care measures, as well as patient safety
