Preventing Chronic Disease (Jul 2004)
Prevention Health Care Quality in America: Findings From the First National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Reports
Abstract
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released in December 2003 the first National Healthcare Quality Report (NHQR) and National Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR) on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (1,2). In this commentary, we summarize the main findings of the reports on preventive care for both primary prevention of disease and secondary prevention of increasing acuity of existing disease and discuss the implications for quality measurement and improvement efforts. Federal partners within the U.S. health care system have recently focused on increasing the use of preventive care services. Tommy G. Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services, issued a challenge in April 2003 at the launch of the Steps to a HealthierUS national initiative: "Approximately 95% of the $1.4 trillion that we spend as a nation on health goes to direct medical services, while approximately 5% is allocated to preventing disease and promoting health. This approach is equivalent to waiting for your car to break down before you take it in for maintenance. By changing the way we view our health, the Steps initiative helps move us from a disease care system to a true health care system." (3) Good quality preventive care holds the promise of greatly reducing the nations health care costs and overall burden of disease. Numerous studies and reports have examined the general quality of preventive care services in the United States (4-7). Others have explored the performance of the U.S. health care system in delivering specific preventive care services such as immunizations (8,9), cancer screening (10-12), and cholesterol and blood pressure screening (13-15). The NHQR and NHDR provide the first national baseline views of the quality of health care services and of differences in how at-risk groups in America use the services. The reports provide one of the broadest examinations to date of prevention health care quality for the nation and among key priority populations, measuring quality of care across a range of dimensions, including the degree to which care is safe, patient centered, timely, and effectively delivered. They track more than 50 primary and secondary prevention quality-of-care measures in five clinical areas, including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, maternal and child health, and respiratory disease.
