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Quality

Good Essays

Please write an Op-Ed to your newspaper of choice in which you argue for national attention to quality and patient safety improvement OR to expanding access and equity in the U.S. health care system.
For those that write about quality, you may wish to include discussion of some of the following: provide evidence on the current state of quality and patient safety in the U.S. health system:

National attention is currently focused on the debacle of The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) roll out. The Federal Health Exchange website, cancelling of thousands of insurance plans and the dismal enrollment numbers are some of the items inundating our headlines. One of the main goals of the ACA is to improve access to health care. It seems as though, …show more content…

This can be best realized through Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), which is enforced through the ACA. Of course EMRs are not the remedy, but they can provide the infrastructure for improvements in data collection. Also, collected data should be more available for public access as it can steer patients to high performers. Of course, the issue with this is that providers may cherry pick patients and procedures to make their numbers look good.
Adjusting Risk
Providers do not have any control over their patient population and hospitals attract specific patient groups based on the services they offer. Interpreting outcome data and rates, especially for different groups of patients may not be the best data to determine quality of care as these rates can also be tied to specific patient characteristics rather than care delivery. Also, comparison among these various groups will be considered to be unfair unless they are adjusted for risk. Including a case mix index is one way to account for the clinical complexity of procedures performed. Even though there are techniques to account for this variability, many of it can go unexplained and has the possibility of inaccurately ranking providers based on patient outcomes.
Changing culture
According to the Institute of Medicine, “the biggest challenge to moving towards a safer health system is changing the culture from one of blaming individuals for errors to one in which errors are treated not

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