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Biomedical subjects

Carolyn M Clancy

Publications and source records attributed to Carolyn M Clancy.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Enhancing quality improvement.

The healthcare systems of most developed nations face a common challenge: a substantial gap exists between the best possible care and the care routinely delivered. Numerous studies in the literature and reports from authoritative bodies, such as the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in the United States, have provided compelling and persuasive evidence that care is not consistently safe, timely, effective, equitable, efficient or patient-centred. A landmark study published in 2003 reported that Americans receive recommended care 54.9% of the time (McGlynn et al. 2003). The recent survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund of sicker adults in six countries - Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States - underscores the pervasive challenges of providing high-quality care. The differences between the six countries pale in contrast to the common theme of significant opportunities for improvement in all nations (Schoen et al. 2005).

Efficiency, Organizational↗
PubMed2005

Using the AHRQ quality indicators to improve health care quality.

In summary, the AHRQ QIs are a set of readily available programs that can be downloaded without charge from the AHRQ Web site. The methodology is completely open and accessible to all users. The QI software can be applied to hospital administrative data that is available within individual institutions or from state data organizations and hospital associations and can provide valuable insights into health care quality at extremely low cost. The QIs have been incorporated into numerous quality assessment reports, including hospital-specific reports, with the aim of improving health care quality at a reasonable cost. With enhancements currently underway, the QIs will be an even more valuable part of the toolkit to improve health care quality in the United States.

Quality Assurance, Health Care↗
PubMed2005

Balancing the nation's health care scorecard: the National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Reports.

BACKGROUND: In January 2005, the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released the congressionally mandated reports on the United States health care system--the 2004 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Reports (NHQR and NHDR). They are intended to summarize the current state of the science of health care quality and disparities for a broad audience, including providers, consumers, researchers, and policy makers. BALANCING THE HEALTH CARE SCORECARDS: The NHQR and NHDR are designed as balanced scorecards, yet measure imbalance is evident with respect to relative attention to the quality dimensions, condition/clinical areas, and priority population. For example, heart disease and nursing home/home health each represent more than 20 measures of the total of 179 measures, whereas mental health and HIV/AIDS care are tracked with a total of six. USING THE SCORECARD FOR QUALITY IMPROVEMENT (QI): The measures making up the scorecards are derived directly from current national initiatives aimed at improving specific performance measures in hospitals, nursing homes, and home health agencies, which facilitates performance benchmarking at different levels of the health care system. CONCLUSION: Much work remains to be done if these reports are to be used to their fullest potential as balanced scorecards for the United States.

Benchmarking↗
PubMed2005

The CAHPS Hospital Survey: development, testing, and use.

The CAHPS Hospital Survey was designed to provide valid and reliable assessments from patients about their hospital care experiences--and yet minimize the cost for hospitals and the burden for survey respondents.

Cooperative Behavior↗
PubMed2003

Practical clinical trials: increasing the value of clinical research for decision making in clinical and health policy.

Decision makers in health care are increasingly interested in using high-quality scientific evidence to support clinical and health policy choices; however, the quality of available scientific evidence is often found to be inadequate. Reliable evidence is essential to improve health care quality and to support efficient use of limited resources. The widespread gaps in evidence-based knowledge suggest that systematic flaws exist in the production of scientific evidence, in part because there is no consistent effort to conduct clinical trials designed to meet the needs of decision makers. Clinical trials for which the hypothesis and study design are developed specifically to answer the questions faced by decision makers are called pragmatic or practical clinical trials (PCTs). The characteristic features of PCTs are that they (1) select clinically relevant alternative interventions to compare, (2) include a diverse population of study participants, (3) recruit participants from heterogeneous practice settings, and (4) collect data on a broad range of health outcomes. The supply of PCTs is limited primarily because the major funders of clinical research, the National Institutes of Health and the medical products industry, do not focus on supporting such trials. Increasing the supply of PCTs will depend on the development of a mechanism to establish priorities for these studies, significant expansion of an infrastructure to conduct clinical research within the health care delivery system, more reliance on high-quality evidence by health care decision makers, and a substantial increase in public and private funding for these studies. For these changes to occur, clinical and health policy decision makers will need to become more involved in all aspects of clinical research, including priority setting, infrastructure development, and funding.

Clinical Trials as Topic↗