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Research & Reports
Resources to aid your efforts to engage other purchasers to pursue quality health care: 1. Juran Report Most Americans assume that our health care system provides the best care in the world. Yet a variety of reports and statistics paint a very different picture -- that of a health care system that is responsible for hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths and preventable injuries, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in unnecessary or avoidable costs for the organizations and individuals who finance care in this country. These quality problems not only exact a human toll in terms of lost lives and pain and suffering, but they also create a huge economic burden in terms of both the direct costs of treating complications and the indirect costs of lost productivity and premature death. Unfortunately, the problems are largely hidden from purchasers and consumers at the community and health plan level. Click the link above to learn more about that state of the American healthcare system and use this information along with other Leapfrog resources to mobilize support from purchasers, plans and providers in your area. 2. Measuring the Efficiency of Health Care Providers The Leapfrog Group and Bridges to Excellence, supported in part by a grant from the Commonwealth Fund, have established a working group of industry stakeholders and experts to launch an on-going, collaborative process to provide guidance on measuring provider efficiency based on the best available knowledge. Until now, there lacked a systematic, empirically informed and consensus-based process to understand how best to measure the cost efficiency of health care providers. Instead, organizations have set out on their own to introduce efficiency measurement initiatives. These initiatives have often been met with resistance from doctors and hospitals on the meaningfulness and validity of the results, in addition to the lack of transparency in the underlying measurement methodologies. Following are links to their work to date: - Measuring Provider Efficiency, Version 1.0 - Comparing Hospital Costs: Adjusting for Differences in Teaching Status and Other Hospital Characteristics (The Lewin Group, April 2005) |