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Background: Although risk adjustment remains a cornerstone for comparing outcomes across hospitals, optimal strategies continue to evolve in the presence of many confounders. We compared conventional regression-based model to approaches particularly suited to leveraging big data.Methods and Results: We assessed hospital all-cause 30-day excess mortality risk among 8952 adults undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention between October 1, 2011, and September 30, 2012, in 24 Massachusetts hospitals using clinical registry data linked with billing data. We compared conventional logistic regression models with augmented inverse probability weighted estimators and targeted maximum likelihood estimators to generate more efficient and unbiased estimates of hospital effects. We also compared a clinically informed and a machine-learning approach to confounder selection, using elastic net penalized regression in the latter case. Hospital excess risk estimates range from -1.4% to 2.0% across methods and confounder sets. Some hospitals were consistently classified as low or as high excess mortality outliers; others changed classification depending on the method and confounder set used. Switching from the clinically selected list of 11 confounders to a full set of 225 confounders increased the estimation uncertainty by an average of 62% across methods as measured by confidence interval length. Agreement among methods ranged from fair, with a κ statistic of 0.39 (SE: 0.16), to perfect, with a κ of 1 (SE: 0.0).Conclusions: Modern causal inference techniques should be more frequently adopted to leverage big data while minimizing bias in hospital performance assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Importance: Dual antiplatelet therapy after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) reduces ischemia but increases bleeding.Objective: To develop a clinical decision tool to identify patients expected to derive benefit vs harm from continuing thienopyridine beyond 1 year after PCI.Design, Setting, and Participants: Among 11,648 randomized DAPT Study patients from 11 countries (August 2009-May 2014), a prediction rule was derived stratifying patients into groups to distinguish ischemic and bleeding risk 12 to 30 months after PCI. Validation was internal via bootstrap resampling and external among 8136 patients from 36 countries randomized in the PROTECT trial (June 2007-July 2014).Exposures: Twelve months of open-label thienopyridine plus aspirin, then randomized to 18 months of continued thienopyridine plus aspirin vs placebo plus aspirin.Main Outcomes and Measures: Ischemia (myocardial infarction or stent thrombosis) and bleeding (moderate or severe) 12 to 30 months after PCI.Results: Among DAPT Study patients (derivation cohort; mean age, 61.3 years; women, 25.1%), ischemia occurred in 348 patients (3.0%) and bleeding in 215 (1.8%). Derivation cohort models predicting ischemia and bleeding had c statistics of 0.70 and 0.68, respectively. The prediction rule assigned 1 point each for myocardial infarction at presentation, prior myocardial infarction or PCI, diabetes, stent diameter less than 3 mm, smoking, and paclitaxel-eluting stent; 2 points each for history of congestive heart failure/low ejection fraction and vein graft intervention; -1 point for age 65 to younger than 75 years; and -2 points for age 75 years or older. Among the high score group (score ≥2, n = 5917), continued thienopyridine vs placebo was associated with reduced ischemic events (2.7% vs 5.7%; risk difference [RD], -3.0% [95% CI, -4.1% to -2.0%], P < .001) compared with the low score group (score <2, n = 5731; 1.7% vs 2.3%; RD, -0.7% [95% CI, -1.4% to 0.09%], P = .07; interaction P < .001). Conversely, continued thienopyridine was associated with smaller increases in bleeding among the high score group (1.8% vs 1.4%; RD, 0.4% [95% CI, -0.3% to 1.0%], P = .26) compared with the low score group (3.0% vs 1.4%; RD, 1.5% [95% CI, 0.8% to 2.3%], P < .001; interaction P = .02). Among PROTECT patients (validation cohort; mean age, 62 years; women, 23.7%), ischemia occurred in 79 patients (1.0%) and bleeding in 37 (0.5%), with a c statistic of 0.64 for ischemia and 0.64 for bleeding. In this cohort, the high-score patients (n = 2848) had increased ischemic events compared with the low-score patients and no significant difference in bleeding.Conclusion and Relevance: Among patients not sustaining major bleeding or ischemic events 1 year after PCI, a prediction rule assessing late ischemic and bleeding risks to inform dual antiplatelet therapy duration showed modest accuracy in derivation and validation cohorts. This rule requires further prospective evaluation to assess potential effects on patient care, as well as validation in other cohorts.Trial Registration: clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00977938. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Early readmission after percutaneous coronary intervention is an important quality metric, but prediction models from registry data have only moderate discrimination. We aimed to improve ability to predict 30-day readmission after percutaneous coronary intervention from a previously validated registry-based model.Methods and Results: We matched readmitted to non-readmitted patients in a 1:2 ratio by risk of readmission, and extracted unstructured and unconventional structured data from the electronic medical record, including need for medical interpretation, albumin level, medical nonadherence, previous number of emergency department visits, atrial fibrillation/flutter, syncope/presyncope, end-stage liver disease, malignancy, and anxiety. We assessed differences in rates of these conditions between cases/controls, and estimated their independent association with 30-day readmission using logistic regression conditional on matched groups. Among 9288 percutaneous coronary interventions, we matched 888 readmitted with 1776 non-readmitted patients. In univariate analysis, cases and controls were significantly different with respect to interpreter (7.9% for cases and 5.3% for controls; P=0.009), emergency department visits (1.12 for cases and 0.77 for controls; P<0.001), homelessness (3.2% for cases and 1.6% for controls; P=0.007), anticoagulation (33.9% for cases and 22.1% for controls; P<0.001), atrial fibrillation/flutter (32.7% for cases and 28.9% for controls; P=0.045), presyncope/syncope (27.8% for cases and 21.3% for controls; P<0.001), and anxiety (69.4% for cases and 62.4% for controls; P<0.001). Anticoagulation, emergency department visits, and anxiety were independently associated with readmission.Conclusions: Patient characteristics derived from review of the electronic health record can be used to refine risk prediction for hospital readmission after percutaneous coronary intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the association between hospital readmission and mortality rates for cardiac patients who were presented with clinical case of acute myocardial infarction, heart failure and pneumonia. It highlights the impact of quality of medical care provided by health care centers in resolving the risk associated with cardiac patients. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the U.S. on the basis of a cohort analysis revealed that differences in performance of hospitals and diagnostic parameters implied by hospital were of immense use in determination of readmission rate and mortality rate of cardiac patients.

The article emphasizes the importance of choosing and using the right methods for patient-centered outcomes research in line with the standards recommended by the Methodology Committee of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) for the conduct of research leading to patient-centered health interventions. It outlines the reasons for the importance of having a basic understanding of the methods underlying medical research findings.

The article presents a research study that examines regional differences in recent trends in myocardial infarction (MI) incidence as well as regional disparities in MI care. A comparison of trends in the utilization of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures across geographic regions is described along with the estimate and comparison of rates of change in the incidence of MI. Assessment as to whether geographic differences in MI care have widened or narrowed over the study period is discussed.

The article presents a study which investigated longitudinal trends in health service utilization, spending, and quality of care for patients with depression. Despite a decline in inpatient spending, mental health spending rose from a mean of 2,802 U.S. dollars to 3,610 U.S. dollars from July 1996 to June 2006. Antidepressant use climbed from 80.6 percent to 86.8 percent. Psychotherapy usage fluctuated and follow-up visits fell during the period.

Background: Outcome measures for patients hospitalized with pneumonia may complement process measures in characterizing quality of care. We sought to develop and validate a hierarchical regression model using Medicare claims data that produces hospital-level, risk-standardized 30-day mortality rates useful for public reporting for patients hospitalized with pneumonia. Methodology/Principal Findings: Retrospective study of fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries age 66 years and older with a principal discharge diagnosis of pneumonia. Candidate risk-adjustment variables included patient demographics, administrative diagnosis codes from the index hospitalization, and all inpatient and outpatient encounters from the year before admission. The model derivation cohort included 224,608 pneumonia cases admitted to 4,664 hospitals in 2000, and validation cohorts included cases from each of years 1998-2003. We compared model-derived state-level standardized mortality estimates with medical record-derived state-level standardized mortality estimates using data from the Medicare National Pneumonia Project on 50,858 patients hospitalized from 1998-2001. The final model included 31 variables and had an area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve of 0.72. In each administrative claims validation cohort, model fit was similar to the derivation cohort. The distribution of standardized mortality rates among hospitals ranged from 13.0% to 23.7%, with 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of 16.5%, 17.4%, and 18.3%, respectively. Comparing model-derived riskstandardized state mortality rates with medical record-derived estimates, the correlation coefficient was 0.86 (Standard Error = 0.032). Conclusions/Significance: An administrative claims-based model for profiling hospitals for pneumonia mortality performs consistently over several years and produces hospital estimates close to those using a medical record model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The association between hospital volume and the death rate for patients who are hospitalized for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, or pneumonia remains unclear. It is also not known whether a volume threshold for such an association exists. Methods: We conducted cross-sectional analyses of data from Medicare administrative claims for all fee-for-service beneficiaries who were hospitalized between 2004 and 2006 in acute care hospitals in the United States for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, or pneumonia. Using hierarchical logistic-regression models for each condition, we estimated the change in the odds of death within 30 days associated with an increase of 100 patients in the annual hospital volume. Analyses were adjusted for patients' risk factors and hospital characteristics. Bootstrapping procedures were used to estimate 95% confidence intervals to identify the condition-specific volume thresholds above which an increased volume was not associated with reduced mortality. Results: There were 734,972 hospitalizations for acute myocardial infarction in 4128 hospitals, 1,324,287 for heart failure in 4679 hospitals, and 1,418,252 for pneumonia in 4673 hospitals. An increased hospital volume was associated with reduced 30-day mortality for all conditions (P<0.001 for all comparisons). For each condition, the association between volume and outcome was attenuated as the hospital's volume increased. For acute myocardial infarction, once the annual volume reached 610 patients (95% confidence interval [CI], 539 to 679), an increase in the hospital volume by 100 patients was no longer significantly associated with reduced odds of death. The volume threshold was 500 patients (95% CI, 433 to 566) for heart failure and 210 patients (95% CI, 142 to 284) for pneumonia. Conclusions: Admission to higher-volume hospitals was associated with a reduction in mortality for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia, although there was a volume threshold above which an increased condition-specific hospital volume was no longer significantly associated with reduced mortality. N Engl J Med 2010;362:1110-8. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study to determine the relationship of cholinesterase inhibitors and syncope-related events in patients with dementia. It utilized the health care database information in Ontario from April 1, 2002 to March 31, 2004. The study employed 19,803 community-dwelling adults with dementia who were given cholinesterase inhibitors and 61,499 patients who were not taking cholinesterase inhibitors. The study found out that those who receive cholinesterase inhibitors have frequent hospital visits for syncope. Results showed that cholinesterase inhibitors offer risks for syncope incidence in dementia patients.

Disparities in access to and quality of health care along racial and ethnic lines are an important national problem. Health care purchasers and payers have a potentially important role to play in alleviating this problem. Using national surveys of 609 employers and 252 health plans with HMO products in 41 U.S. markets, we examined awareness of racial and ethnic disparities in health care access and quality, perceptions of employer and health plan role in addressing disparities, and reported efforts to measure and reduce disparities. Our findings suggest that most health plans and many employers are aware of the existence of substantial disparities and that health plans, but not employers, have taken steps to examine and influence patterns of care by race and ethnicity among their members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural U.S. communities face major challenges in ensuring the availability of high-quality health care. We examined whether hospital-specific, all-cause, thirty-day risk-standardized mortality rates (RSMRs) following acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia varied by hospitals' geographic remoteness. We analyzed 2001-2003 Medicare administrative data, comparing RSMRs among hospitals located in urban, large rural, small rural, or remote small rural regions. We found only small mortality differences across remoteness regions for hospitalizations for the three conditions. We examine the implications of these findings for the millions of Americans who rely upon rural hospitals for their care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Great strides have been made in the creation of programs aimed at improving the safety and quality of health care in the United States, including measurement systems and corresponding standards in the ambulatory setting that are used for public reporting or pay-for-performance. The diversity of physician practices in the United States makes measurement challenging. In many parts of the country, substantial proportions of both primary care and specialist physicians continue to practice in solo or small group practices. This article reviews the practice landscape in the United States; describes performance measurement challenges in small practice settings, including financial and staffing implications; discusses statistical issues that affect assessment of practice quality; and describes potential solutions to the issues raised. Challenges of performance measurement in small practice settings include lack of infrastructure and health information technology, lack of support staff, and increased burden. These issues are compounded by the difficulty of assessing a smaller number of patients spread over multiple payers. To overcome some of these challenges, design and measure selection recommendations for the performance assessment system are presented and practice-level and health plan-level interventions are suggested that might facilitate the inclusion of small practice settings in performance assessment programs. Because a high proportion of U.S. physicians practice in small settings, programs and policies based on physician performance measurement should incorporate features that facilitate the inclusion of these physicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study of employers' use of value-based purchasing strategies. As value-based purchasing was originally perceived, the idea was that employers and other large purchasers of health care would contract with health plans according to their value and costs. They were also to promote high quality in medical care. Several reports blasting medical care in the U.S. have led to some employer based efforts to improve health care for their employees. This study sought to find out if their efforts are having an benefit. The study found that polled employers have not implemented the appropriate programs that fit in with value-based purchasing.

This article presents the results of a study which sought to compare the quality of care in the U.S. within and between Medicaid and the commercial population in 3 different managed care health insurance plans. The Medicaid-only plans serve Medicaid enrollees only, commercial-only plans serve commercial enrollees and the combination Medicaid/commercial plans cover both populations. Eleven quality indicators were looked at for the purpose of comparison. The study found that Medicaid management care patients got lower-quality care than commercial managed care patients. There was no real difference found in quality of care for the Medicaid patients who had either type of managed care policy.

Hospital profiling involves a comparison of a health care provider's structure, processes of care, or outcomes to a standard, often in the form of a report card. Given the ubiquity of report cards and similar consumer ratings in contemporary American culture, it is notable that these are a relatively recent phenomenon in health care. Prior to the 1986 release of Medicare hospital outcome data, little such information was publicly available. We review the historical evolution of hospital profiling with special emphasis on outcomes; present a detailed history of cardiac surgery report cards, the paradigm for modem provider profiling; discuss the potential unintended negative consequences of public report cards; and describe various statistical methodologies for quantifying the relative performance of cardiac surgery programs. Outstanding statistical issues are also described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demand is increasing for public accountability in health care. In 2000, the Massachusetts legislature mandated a state report card for cardiac surgery and percutaneous coronary interventions. During the planning and implementation of this report card, a number of observations were made that may prove useful to other states faced with similar mandates. These include the necessity for constructive, nonadversarial collaboration between regulators, clinicians, and statisticians; the advantages of preemptive adoption of The Society of Thoracic Surgeons [STS] National Cardiac Database, preferably before a report card is mandated; the support and resources available to cardiac surgeons through the STS, the National Cardiac Database Committee, and the Duke Clinical Research Institute; the value of a state STS organization; and the importance of media education to facilitate fair and dispassionate press coverage. Some important features of report cards may vary from state to state depending on the legislative mandate, local preferences, and statistical expertise. These include the choice of a statistical model and analytical technique, national versus regional reference population, and whether individual surgeon profiling is required. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The performance of physicians in their day-to-day clinical practices has become an area of intense public interest. Both patients and health care purchasers want more effective means of identifying excellent clinicians, and a variety of organizations are discussing and implementing plans for assessing the performance of individual clinicians. In this article, we review the current state of physician clinical performance assessment with a focus on its usefulness for competency assessment. We describe recommendations for a physician clinical performance assessment system for these purposes, and identify ways in which current methods of performance assessment fall short of these. We conclude that important technical barriers stand in the way of using physician clinical performance assessment for evaluating the competency of individual physicians. Overcoming these barriers will require considerable additional research and development. Even then, for some uses, physician clinical performance assessment at the individual physician level may be technically impossible to accomplish in a valid and fair way. jrnlabbrev="JAMA" year="2003" volume="290" page="1183-1189">. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative performance monitoring of health care providers has become an increasingly prominent activity in health care delivery. As a consequence, multidimensional "report cards" comparing the quality of services provided by diverse health care organizations have begun to appear. We present a case study examining the performance of 22 geographically defined health care systems, known as Veterans Integrated Service Networks; involving the treatment of more than 37,000 veterans discharged from general psychiatry program beds in fiscal year 1998. We describe multilevel multidimensional latent variable models and fit these to a set of related mixed discrete and continuous outcomes to identify networks providing inadequate care to its patients. We use validation sample to assess model fit by comparing observed statistics to the distribution of the statistics across replicated datasets. We propose using posterior tail probabilities associated with functions of the latent variables to select networks with poor outcomes, and finally compare our results with those from current methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. To compare process of care and outcome after acute myocardial infarction, for patients with and without mental illness, cared for in the Veterans Health Administration (VA) health care system. Data Sources/Setting. Primary clinical data from 81 VA hospitals. Study Design. This was a retrospective cohort study of 4,340 veterans discharged with clinically confirmed acute myocardial infarction. Of these, 859 (19.8 percent) met the definition of mental illness.Measures were age–adjusted in–hospital and 90–day cardiac procedure use; age–adjusted relative risks (RR) of use of thrombolytic therapy, betablockers, angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, or aspirin at discharge; risk adjusted 30–day and one–year mortality. Results. Patients with mental illness were marginally less likely than those without mental illness to undergo in–hospital angiography (age–adjusted RR 0.90 [95 percent confidence interval: 0.83, 0.98]), but there was no significant difference in the age adjusted RR of coronary artery bypass graft surgery in the 90 days after admission (0.85 [0.69,1.05]), or in the receipt of medications of known benefit. For example, ideal candidates with and without mental illness were equally likely to receive beta–blockers at the time of discharge (age–adjusted RR 0.92 [0.82, 1.02]). The risk–adjusted odds ratio (OR) for death in patients with mental illness versus those without mental illness within 30 days was 1.00 (0.75,1.32), and for death within one year was 1.25 (1.00,1.53). Conclusions. Veterans Health Administration patients with mental illness were marginally less likely than those without mental illness to receive diagnostic angiography, and no less likely to receive revascularization or medications of known benefit after acute myocardial infarction. Mortality at one year may have been higher, although this finding did not reach statistical significance. These findings are consistent with other studies showing reduced health care disparities in the VA for other vulnerable groups, and suggest that an integrated health care system with few financial barriers to health care access may attenuate some health care disparities. Further work should address how health care organizational features might narrow disparities in health care for vulnerable groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent public debate on costs and effectiveness of health care in the United States has generated a growing emphasis on “profiling” of medical care providers. The process of profiling involves comparing resource use and quality of care among medical providers to a community or a normative standard. This is valuable for targeting quality improvement strategies. For example, hospital profiles may be used to determine whether institutions deviate in important ways in the process of care they deliver. In this article we propose a class of performance indices to profile providers. These indices are based on posterior tail probabilities of relevant model parameters that indicate the degree of poor performance by a provider. We apply our performance indices to profile hospitals on the basis of 30-day mortality rates for a cohort of elderly heart attack patients. The analysis used data from 96 acute care hospitals located in one state and accounted for patient and hospital characteristics using a hierarchical logistic regression model. We used Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to fit the model and to obtain performance indices of interest. In particular, we estimated the posterior probability that mortality at the ith hospital is 1½ times the median mortality rate over all the hospitals in the state. We also calculated the posterior probability that the deviation in average risk-adjusted and “standardited” mortality at the ith hospital is “large.” We compare the results of evaluating hospitals based on our performance indices to those obtained using conventional measures. With 30-day risk-adjusted mortality rates ranging from 12% to 14%, one-quarter of the hospitals had posterior probabilities that hospital-specific mortality was 1½ times the median mortality rate greater than 15%. The posterior probability of a large difference between risk-adjusted and standardized mortality rates was less than 6% for three-quarters of the hospitals we examined. Although there were differences in the evaluation of each hospital by the various criteria, one hospital consistently emerged as having the worst performance by all criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of post-marketing surveillance of medical devices. Medical devices reportedly experience a major hurdles to safety monitoring, that is, the dearth of unique device identifiers (UDIs). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been authorized to develop a comprehensive UDI system, which is under review within the Office of Management and Budget. Clinical registries for monitoring safety device have become a mandatory component of the health care system.

Cardiac surgical report cards have historically been mandatory. This paradigm changed when The Society of Thoracic Surgeons recently implemented a voluntary public reporting program based on benchmark analyses from its National Cardiac Database. The primary rationale is to provide transparency and accountability, thus affirming the fundamental ethical right of patient autonomy. Previous studies suggest that public reporting facilitates quality improvement, although other approaches such as confidential feedback of results and regional quality improvement initiatives are also effective. Public reporting has not substantially impacted patient referral patterns or market share. However, this may change with implementation of healthcare reform and with refinement of public reporting formats to enhance consumer interpretability. Finally, the potential unintended adverse consequences of public reporting must be monitored, particularly to assure that hospitals and surgeons remain willing to care for high-risk patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Appropriate implementation is essential to create a credible public reporting system. Ideally, data should be obtained from an audited clinical data registry, and structure, process, or outcomes metrics may be reported. Composite measures are increasingly used, as are measures of appropriateness, patient satisfaction, functional status, and health-related quality of life. Classification of provider performance should use statistical criteria appropriate to the policy objectives and to the desired balance of sensitivity and specificity. Public reports should use simplified visual or tabular presentation aids that maximize correct interpretation of numerical data. Because of sample size issues, and to emphasize that cardiac surgery requires team-based care, public reporting should generally be focused at the program rather than individual surgeon level. This may also help to mitigate risk aversion, the avoidance of high-risk patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Some have the opinion that patients cared for in Veterans Health Administration (VHA) hospitals receive care of poorer quality than those cared for in non-VHA institutions. To assess the quality of care in VHA hospitals, we compared the outcome of acute myocardial infarction among patients in VHA and non-VHA institutions while controlling for potential confounders, including coexisting conditions and severity of illness. Methods: We studied 2486 veterans discharged from 81 VHA hospitals and 29,249 Medicare patients discharged from 1530 non-VHA hospitals, restricting our samples to men at least 65 years of age who were discharged with confirmed acute myocardial infarction. We compared coexisting conditions, severity of illness, and 30-day and 1-year mortality in the two samples. Results: VHA patients were significantly more likely than Medicare patients to have a recorded history of hypertension (64.3 percent vs. 57.3 percent), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or asthma (30.9 percent vs. 23.5 percent), diabetes (34.8 percent vs. 29.0 percent), stroke (20.4 percent vs. 14.2 percent), or dementia (7.2 percent vs. 4.8 percent) (P<0.001 for all comparisons). According to both multivariate logistic regression and an analysis using 2265 matched pairs of VHA and Medicare patients, there were no significant differences in 30-day or 1-year mortality. The matched-pairs analysis found that the difference in mortality at 30 days (the mortality rate among Medicare patients minus the mortality rate among VHA patients), averaged over the 5-year age groups, was –0.8 percent (95 percent confidence interval, –2.8 to 1.3), and the difference in mortality at 1 year was –1.3 percent (95 percent confidence interval, –3.9 to 1.3). Conclusions: VHA patients had more coexisting conditions than Medicare patients. Nevertheless, we found no significant difference in mortality between VHA and Medicare patients, a result that suggests a similar quality of care for acute myocardial infarction. (N Engl J Med 2000;343:1934-41.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Guideline-based admission therapies for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) significantly improve 30-day survival, but little is known about their association with long-term outcomes.Objectives: This study evaluated the association of 5 AMI admission therapies (aspirin, beta-blockers, acute reperfusion therapy, door-to-balloon [D2B] time ≤90 min, and time to fibrinolysis ≤30 min) with life expectancy and years of life saved after AMI.Methods: We analyzed data from the Cooperative Cardiovascular Project, a study of Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized for AMI, with 17 years of follow-up. Life expectancy and years of life saved after AMI were calculated using Cox proportional hazards regression with extrapolation using exponential models.Results: Survival for recipients and non-recipients of the 5 guideline-based therapies diverged early after admission and continued to diverge during 17-year follow-up. Receipt of aspirin, beta-blockers, and acute reperfusion therapy on admission was associated with longer life expectancy of 0.78 (standard error [SE]: 0.05), 0.55 (SE: 0.06), and 1.03 (SE: 0.12) years, respectively. Patients receiving primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) within 90 min lived 1.08 (SE: 0.49) years longer than patients with D2B times >90 min, and door-to-needle (D2N) times ≤30 min were associated with 0.55 (SE: 0.12) more years of life. A dose-response relationship was observed between longer D2B and D2N times and shorter life expectancy after AMI.Conclusions: Guideline-based therapy for AMI admission is associated with both early and late survival benefits, and results in meaningful gains in life expectancy and large numbers of years of life saved in elderly patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has substantially increased financial investment and introduced favourable policies for strengthening its primary health care system with core responsibilities in preventing and managing chronic diseases such as hypertension and emerging infectious diseases such as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, widespread gaps in the quality of primary health care still exist. In this Review, we aim to identify the causes for this poor quality, and provide policy recommendations. System challenges include: the suboptimal education and training of primary health-care practitioners, a fee-for-service payment system that incentivises testing and treatments over prevention, fragmentation of clinical care and public health service, and insufficient continuity of care throughout the entire health-care system. The following recommendations merit consideration: (1) enhancement of the quality of training for primary health-care physicians, (2) establishment of performance accountability to incentivise high-quality and high-value care; (3) integration of clinical care with the basic public health services, and (4) strengthening of the coordination between primary health-care institutions and hospitals. Additionally, China should consider modernising its primary health-care system through the establishment of a learning health system built on digital data and innovative technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The slow spread of treatments supported by empirical evidence and the rapid diffusion of treatments lacking such support play major roles in the lower quality of mental health care received by people with severe mental illnesses compared with the care of less severely ill people. Further, the rapid spread of treatments that are of low cost-effectiveness limits the system's ability to provide the full gamut of high-value treatments available to treat this vulnerable population. Using the case of schizophrenia, we review the context in which these paradoxical patterns of diffusion have occurred, and we propose policy solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The ability to quantify the quality of cardiovascular care critically depends on the translation of recommendations for high-quality care into the measurement of that care. As payers and regulatory agencies increasingly seek to quantify healthcare quality, the implications of the measurement process on practicing physicians are likely to grow. This statement describes the methodology by which the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association approach creating performance measures and devising techniques for quantifying those aspects of care that directly reflect the quality of cardiovascular care. Methods for defining target populations, identifying dimensions of care, synthesizing the literature, and operationalizing the process of selecting measures are proposed. It is hoped that new sets of measures will be created through the implementation of this approach, and consequently, through the use of such measurement sets in the context of quality improvement efforts, the quality of cardiovascular care will improve. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Background: To improve insurance coverage of mental health and substance-abuse services, the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program offered mental health and substance-abuse benefits on a par with general medical benefits beginning in January 2001. The plans were encouraged to manage care. Methods: We compared seven FEHB plans from 1999 through 2002 with a matched set of health plans that did not have benefits on a par with mental health and substance-abuse benefits (parity of mental health and substance-abuse benefits). Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we compared the claims patterns of matched pairs of FEHB and control plans by examining the rate of use, total spending, and out-of-pocket spending among users of mental health and substance-abuse services. Results: The difference-in-differences analysis indicated that the observed increase in the rate of use of mental health and substance-abuse services after the implementation of the parity policy was due almost entirely to a general trend in increased use that was observed in comparison health plans as well as FEHB plans. The implementation of parity was associated with a statistically significant increase in use in one plan (+0.78 percent, P<0.05) a significant decrease in use in one plan (−0.96 percent, P<0.05), and no significant difference in use in the other five plans (range, −0.38 percent to +0.23 percent; P>0.05 for each comparison). For beneficiaries who used mental health and substance-abuse services, spending attributable to the implementation of parity decreased significantly for three plans (range, −$201.99 to −$68.97; P<0.05 for each comparison) and did not change significantly for four plans (range, −$42.13 to +$27.11; P>0.05 for each comparison). The implementation of parity was associated with significant reductions in out-of-pocket spending in five of seven plans. Conclusions: When coupled with management of care, implementation of parity in insurance benefits for behavioral health care can improve insurance protection without increasing total costs. N Engl J Med 2006;354:1378-86. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]