Guides/Reports
American Hospital Association guides and reports for members and the health care field.
The business adage 'what gets measured gets managed' applies in health care. Two projects focus on measuring and improving the patient experience in community clinics.
The National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance, 2011, updates a series of comprehensive assessments of U.S. population health and health care quality, access, efficiency, and equity. It finds substantial improvement on quality-of-care indicators that have been the focus of public…
In a recent study, the non-profit Commonwealth Fund found that the U.S. ranks 16th out of 16 nations when it comes to preventable deaths. If we did as well as the top-performing countries, France and Australia, close to 90,000 deaths could be prevented each year. As costs continue to climb, adding…
The new Multi-professional Patient Safety Curriculum Guide released by WHO Patient Safety in October 2011 promotes the need for patient safety education to improve the safety of care. The comprehensive guide assists universities and schools in the fields of dentistry, medicine, midwifery, nursing…
Accreditation by The Joint Commission was associated with stronger performance on disease-specific measures of hospital quality of care. Accredited hospitals also appeared to achieve greater improvements in care over time compared to non-accredited hospitals.
The Leapfrog Group, a consortium of public and private employers who purchase health care for more than 30 million Americans, strives to improve patient safety through encouraging hospitals to implement the National Quality Forum's safe practices and 3 other key safety interventions (including…
This white paper introduces an overall approach and tools designed to support two processes: the proactive preparation of a plan for managing serious clinical adverse events, and the reactive emergency response of an organization that has no such plan.
The study concludes that more widespread implementation and effective use of e-prescribing in ambulatory care settings will require practice transformation efforts that focus on work process redesign while being attentive to effects on patient and pharmacy involvement in prescribing. Improved…
The Rand Health Insurance Experiment found that patients had little or no control over their health care spending once they began to receive a physician's care, but a new study shows that this has changed for those enrolled in consumer-directed health plans.
The rate of 'mortality amenable to health care' that is--deaths that are considered preventable with timely and effective health care declined for people under age 75 across 16 high-income nations between 1997-1998 and 2006-2007. While all countries showed improvement, the United States improved…