Journal of general internal medicine
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Language barriers can impact pharmaceutical disease management leading to potential health disparities among limited English proficiency (LEP) people with diabetes mellitus (DM) in the United States (US). ⋯ Our findings indicate that the differences in DM outcomes among LEP people are likely attributed to factors other than medication prescription. These might include cultural beliefs, dietary adjustments, and communication barriers in healthcare. Enhanced patient education, acknowledgment of cultural practices, and improved language services could potentially mitigate these disparities.
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Quality of care can be measured in several dimensions: different clinical disciplines, structures/processes/outcomes of care (SPO), and also different domains of quality (effectiveness, safety, care coordination, patient-centeredness, efficiency, timeliness, and community/population health). To our knowledge, no previous study has compared different sets of performance measures in terms of how well they cover these different aspects of quality. ⋯ The measure sets we examined, which overwhelmingly measure processes of care, should be encouraged to add structure and outcomes measures. All three measure sets under-emphasize certain aspects of quality such as timeliness, care coordination, efficiency, and patient-centeredness. Finally, and most importantly, all three measure sets focused overwhelmingly on measuring the activities of family physicians; attention should be given to building measures that will examine the activities of other clinicians.