Healthcare Quality and Associated Costs
NQF: Safe practices (2009)
"Nearly 10 years after the Institute of Medicine’s report To Err Is Human issued a call to action, uniformly reliable safety in healthcare has not yet been achieved," notes National Quality Forum President and CEO Janet M. Corrigan, PhD, MBA, in a foreword to NQF's 2009 Update of its "Safe Practices for Better Healthcare" report. "Every day, patients are still harmed, or nearly harmed, in healthcare institutions across the country. This harm is not intentional; however, it can usually be avoided. The errors that create harm often stem back to organizational system failures, leadership shortfalls, and predictable human behavioral factors. We can, and must, continue to do better."
Corrigan urges every healthcare stakeholder group to "insist that provider organizations demonstrate their commitment to reducing healthcare error and improving safety by putting into place evidence-based safe practices. This includes promoting an environment of effective reporting and learning from errors or mistakes within a blame-free culture. Collective reporting and learning from the mistakes of others is also an essential component of this process to improve healthcare safety."
Click on NQF-Endorsed® Safe Practices for Better Healthcare to access the 2009 updated report.
Reducing healthcare costs through efficient purchasing (2003-2004)
In 2003-2004, concerned with escalating healthcare costs, the Midwest Business Group on Health, a nonprofit coalition of public and private employers in 11 states, brought together a diverse group of healthcare experts to analyze the issue of poor quality. Central to the MBGH study is the premise that government and healthcare purchasers can play a key role in improving the effectiveness of clinical care, particularly with regard to the financial and human costs of poor quality. Click on Human Costs of Poor Quality to access the report abstract, on Improved Purchasing for the full report.
ACP: Achieving a high-performance healthcare system with universal access (2008)
In this position paper, originally published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the American College of Physicians argues for considering what has worked in other countries when determining how to fix the American system of care. The initial section of this paper looks closely at healthcare in the US; the second compares American healthcare with that provided in other industrialized nations. In the concluding section, the authors suggest lessons American healthcare can learn from these other countries' experiences.
Click on What the U.S. Can Learn to access the Jan. 1, 2008, ACP paper.