Dive Brief:
- An analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation concludes quality is improving in many areas of the US healthcare system but the US continues to be outperformed by comparable countries on several key measures.
- The conclusion was based on the best available data from a variety of sources on health outcomes, quality of care and access to care, the foundation writes.
- The brief examines the shortcomings of existing indicators on healthcare quality and the difficulties in establishing more meaningful measures that would illustrate how US healthcare is impacting Americans' health.
Dive Insight:
One takeway is the US has good data on what we're spending on healthcare, but little information on what we're getting in return or how outcomes are being impacted by the format of the US healthcare system.
The study's key conclusions based on available indicators are:
- US healthcare has improved on numerous quality measures, including mortality amenable to healthcare, hospital-acquired infections and vaccination rates for children.
- The US has gone downhill on several other measures, including health-related quality of life.
- The US outperforms comparable countries on certain measures including wait times to access specialists and hospital admissions for uncontrolled diabetes.
- However, comparable countries outperform the US on a wider variety of measures, including life expectancy at birth, cost barriers to healthcare access, unretreived surgical items or device fragments and "burden of disease," which estimates years of life lost as a result of poor health or disability.