Health care quality measurement and reporting have grown rapidly during the past decade and now enjoy wide support. The CAHPS surveys, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality since 1995, have been a key part of the effort to generate scientifically sound measures of consumer...

Hospitals and post-acute care providers have developed quality measures to evaluate their effectiveness in preventing readmissions, but these measures are lacking in long-term care. This issue brief discusses the need for similar measures to assess the quality of long-term care for people in...

Although health information technology (IT) is at the center of efforts to improve the nation’s health care system by enhancing patient safety and reducing inefficiencies, little evidence exists to link IT to quality improvements and efficiency gains. This new issue brief reports on how six...

Health information technology has great potential for improving health care through Health Information Exchange (HIE), the exchange of health-related information electronically across providers, with strong privacy, confidentiality, and security protections. If safety-net providers are to keep...

PACE is a Medicare managed care benefit intended to prolong the independence and enhance the quality of life of frail beneficiaries by providing solutions to the service delivery problems encountered by those who remain living in the community. This report estimated the effect of PACE on...

This study randomly assigned Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries who had chronic illnesses and volunteered to participate in 15 care coordination programs to treatment or control status. Nurses provided patient education (mostly by telephone) to improve adherence and ability to communicate...

Using consumer focus groups, a technical expert panel, and careful development and testing, this study successfully enabled and administered an existing survey on primary care to assess the health care experiences reported by adults with disabilities.

This study compares racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in access to care and quality of care for U.S. health center patients and non-health center patients. Data for the study came from the 2002 Community Health Center User Survey and the 2003 National Healthcare Disparities Report....

Using data from patients surveyed after primary care provider visits, this working paper found patients had favorable perceptions of electronic health records (EHRs). Patients believed that EHRs improved the quality of care, and most were not concerned with confidentiality of records. Adopters'...