Chartbook on Effective Treatment

Organization of the Chartbook on Effective Treatment

• Part of a series related to the National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report (QDR).
• Contents:
  • Overview of the QDR.
  • Overview of Effective Treatment, one of the priorities of the National Quality Strategy.
  • Summary of trends and disparities in Effective Treatment from the QDR.
  • Tracking of individual measures of Effective Treatment:
    • Cardiovascular Disease.
    • Cancer.
    • Chronic Kidney Disease.
    • Diabetes.
    • HIV and AIDS.
    • Mental Health and Substance Abuse.
    • Musculoskeletal Diseases.
    • Respiratory Diseases.

Background

This Chartbook on Effective Treatment is part of a family of documents and tools that support the National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report (QDR). The QDR includes annual reports to Congress mandated in the Healthcare Research and Quality Act of 1999 (P.L. 106-129). These reports provide a comprehensive overview of the quality of health care received by the general U.S. population and disparities in care experienced by different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. The purpose of the reports is to assess the performance of our health system and to identify areas of strengths and weaknesses in the health care system along three main axes: access to health care, quality of health care, and priorities of the National Quality Strategy.

The reports are based on more than 250 measures of quality and disparities covering a broad array of health care services and settings. Data are generally available through 2013. The reports are produced with the help of an Interagency Work Group led by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and submitted on behalf of the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Changes for 2015

Beginning with the 2015 report, the National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report and National Quality Strategy Update have been integrated into a single document that describes the Nation’s progress in improving health care access, quality, and disparities. This is a joint effort to address the progress made against the National Quality Strategy (NQS) priorities at the 5-year anniversary of the Strategy.

The NQS is backed by the National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report data. Integration of these two efforts within the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality supports the development of a more comprehensive report on the success of efforts to achieve better health and health care and reduce disparities.

Key Findings of the 2015 QDR

• The Nation has made progress in improving the health care system to achieve the three aims of better care, smarter spending, and healthier people, but there is still work to do, specifically to address disparities in care.
• Access to health care has improved dramatically, led by sustained reductions in the number of Americans without health insurance and increases in the number of Americans with a usual source of medical care.
• Quality of health care continues to improve, but wide variation exists across the National Quality Strategy priorities.
• Disparities related to race and socioeconomic status persist among measures of access and all National Quality Strategy priorities, but progress is being made in some areas.
• Disparities in quality of care and disparities in access to care typically follow the same pattern, although disparities in access tend to be more common than disparities in quality.

Chartbooks

• QDR supported by a series of related chartbooks that:
  • Present information on individual measures.
  • Are updated periodically.
  • Are posted on the Web.
• Order and topics of chartbooks:
  • Access to care.
  • Priorities of the National Quality Strategy.
  • Access and quality of care for different priority populations.

Chartbooks Organized Around Priorities of the National Quality Strategy

1. Making care safer by reducing harm caused in the delivery of care.
2. Ensuring that each person and family is engaged as partners in their care.
3. Promoting effective communication and coordination of care.
4. Promoting the most effective prevention and treatment practices for the leading causes of mortality, starting with cardiovascular disease.
5. Working with communities to promote wide use of best practices to enable healthy living.
6. Making quality care more affordable for individuals, families, employers, and governments by developing and spreading new health care delivery models.

Effective Treatment is one of the six national priorities identified by the National Quality Strategy.

The National Quality Strategy has identified three long-term goals related to effective treatment:

1. Promote cardiovascular health through community interventions that result in improvement of social, economic, and environmental factors.
2. Promote cardiovascular health through interventions that result in adoption of the most healthy lifestyle behaviors across the lifespan.
3. Promote cardiovascular health through receipt of effective clinical preventive services across the lifespan in clinical and community settings.

Improving the quality of American health care demands an intense focus on preventing and treating cardiovascular disease. The lessons from this effort will feed into efforts addressing conditions such as HIV/AIDS and other chronic illnesses. Future initiatives will address a broad range of diseases and age ranges.

This chartbook begins with measures of effective treatment of cardiovascular disease. This is followed by measures of effective treatment of seven other leading causes of death in the United States.

Chartbook on Effective Treatment

• This chartbook includes:
  • Summary of trends across measures of Effective Treatment from the QDR.
  • Figures illustrating select measures of Effective Treatment.
• Introduction and Methods contains information about methods used in the chartbook.
• A Data Query tool provides access to all data tables.

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