Commonwealth Fund publishes National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance, 2011

Posted on October 18, 2011 | No Comments
Filed under Disparities, Health Care Quality and Delivery System Reform, Library, Public Health, Third Party Resources, Workforce and Access

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The Commonwealth Fund debuted the “National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance, 2011″ in a press briefing at the Kaiser Family Foundation on October 18, 2011. Cathy Schoen, the Senior Vice President for Research and Evaluation at Commonwealth, summarized the report, which updates a series of comprehensive assessments of U.S. population health and health care quality, access, efficiency, and equity. The report notes substantial improvement on several care quality indicators. However, the U.S. fell short on key measures as well. Across 42 performance indicators, the U.S. achieved a total score of 64 out of a possible 100, when comparing national rates with domestic and international benchmarks. Costs rose sharply, access to care declined, health system efficiency remained low, health disparities persisted, and heath outcomes also fell below target. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) targets many of the important gaps identified by the Commonwealth Scorecard.

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Health Affairs article finds Medicare’s pay-for-performance program did not spur quality improvement

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Medicare’s flagship hospital pay-for-performance program, the Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration, began in 2003 but changed its incentive design in late 2006. The goals were to encourage greater quality improvement, particularly among lower-performing hospitals. However, the authors of a recent Health Affairs article found no evidence that the change achieved these goals. Although the program changes were intended to provide strong incentives for improvement to the lowest-performing hospitals, the authors found that in practice the new incentive design resulted in the strongest incentives for hospitals that had already achieved quality performance ratings just above the median for the entire group of participating hospitals. Yet during the course of the program, these hospitals improved no more than others. The findings in this article raise questions about whether pay-for-performance strategies that reward improvement can generate greater improvement among lower performing providers. They also cast some doubt on the extent to which hospitals respond to the specific structure of economic incentives in pay-for-performance programs.

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Update: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health and Health Care

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Primary Care Physician Workforce

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Essential Community Providers

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Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health and Health Care

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Requires federally conducted or supported health programs to collect and report data related to race, ethnicity, and other indicators sufficient to generate statistically reliable estimates of health disparities.

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