Medical care
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Recent efforts to provide an annual profile of the health care quality of the nation's health care delivery system and to identify health care disparities in the population's access to and use of health care services have served to stimulate design innovations and content enhancements to the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). ⋯ The MEPS questionnaire has been expanded to include content taken from the Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Study (CAHPS) to facilitate assessments of patient experiences with health care at the national level. The survey now includes the series of questions from the SF-12 and the EuroQol 5D to improve the survey's capacity to measure health status. Additional condition-specific questions for diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, and heart disease were added to identify the health care services received for treatment and to determine whether the care received was consistent with practice guidelines. Sample design modifications are presented, with particular emphasis given to a summary of the recent sample size increase and resultant improvements in the precision of resultant survey estimates. Attention is also given to changes in survey design, estimation, and data collection strategies that improve data quality.
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To describe methods for estimating hypothetical private sector payments for Veterans Health Administration (VA) acute inpatient stays. ⋯ Differences in organization, practice, and incentives limit estimates of the financial impact of shifting VA acute inpatient care to the private sector.
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Comparative Study
The effect of publicly reporting hospital performance on market share and risk-adjusted mortality at high-mortality hospitals.
It is unclear whether publicly reporting hospitals' risk-adjusted mortality affects market share and mortality at outlier hospitals. ⋯ Despite CHQC's strengths, identifying hospitals with higher than expected mortality did not adversely affect their market share or, with one exception, lead to improved outcomes. This failure may have resulted from consumer disinterest or difficulty interpreting CHQC reports, unwillingness of businesses to create incentives targeted to hospitals' performance, and hospitals' inability to develop effective quality improvement programs.
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Comparative Study
Estimating private sector professional fees for VA providers.
To describe new methods used to estimate inpatient and outpatient Medicare-based professional fees for Veterans Health Administration (VA) services. ⋯ Differences between the VA and the private sector maybe overstated because VA salaries of nonphysicians were not included in the VA budgets. Conversely, the extent to which VA professional services were undercounted in VA information systems used in this study may understate the difference. Future research may consider additional data collection approaches or information systems enhancements to enumerate more accurately all provider services that are reimbursable in the private sector.
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Comparative Study
Using the cost distribution report in estimating private sector payments: what adjustments should researchers make?
To reapportion Veterans Health Administration (VA) annual expenditures into benefit categories for comparison with estimated payments by private sector providers. ⋯ Revisions to bring the CDR more in line with private sector payment categories would improve effectiveness for internal VA analyses and external expenditure comparisons. CDR revisions would require changes in recording some clinical workload (eg, rehabilitation and extended care) and classifying residential and domiciliary programs separate from inpatient care. Benefits that were not assigned expenditures for comparison with payments represent a potential liability if the VA were to purchase health care services in the marketplace. Variation among hospitals on expenditures not clearly identified in the CDR was significant and raises questions about the effectiveness of capitated budget methodologies using either the CDR or the decision support system.