Quality and Cost
Quality
The Institute of Medicine defines quality as "the degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge".
The key components for access to quality care:
- Safe
- Timely
- Effective
- Efficient
- Equitable
- Patient-Centered
This information comes from the IOM 2001 report Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century. There is much more to say about quality in health care. You could spend your career on this topic and still have more to learn. Quality will be a recurring theme, and we will return specifically to quality, evaluating quality, and quality improvement initiatives later in the semester.
Cost
Why do we care so much about cost? Because 17.2% of our spending in 2012 as a nation was on health-related expenditures. Health care costs are increasing faster than wages, which means that an increasing proportion of household income is spent on health care (premiums and out of pocket). If health care spending crowds out other spending priorities on the national or individual basis we have a problem. Are we spending too much? That depends on your perspective and spending priorities.
National Health Expenditures: total amount spent for all heath services, health research and related construction activities for one calendar year.
- Categories of spending: personal health care (spending for medical conditions on individuals), government public health activity, government administration and net cost of health insurance (profit or loss of insurance companies) and investment (noncommercial research, structures, equipment).
- NHE may also be broken down by source of funding: consumer out of pocket, private health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and other spending by state or federal government).
Gross Domestic Profit (GDP): Summary measure of the economy, could be measured in a few ways. Consider this to be how much is spent in the US on everything, including healthcare.
PDF File
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US Annual Health Expenditures Matching Exercise |
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In the matching exercise below, match the categories of expenditure with the numbers and dollar expenditures. You can use this file on US National Health Expenditures to help you.. |
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