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| The Vermont Health Care Quality Report 2008 |
Ch2: Measuring Quality of Care Ch3: Chronic Illness in Vermont
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The Vermont Program for Quality in
Health Care, Inc has developed a summary of healthcare utilization using
the Vermont Hospital Discharge Data files to provide an overview of the
trends in inpatient care in Vermont hospitals for 2002 through 2006. The
data files include patient demographic and clinical information such as
age, gender, diagnoses, and procedures performed and additional
information such as payer source, admission source and discharge status
for each patient.
Until the mid-nineties, it was widely assumed that improving the quality of US healthcare required an increase in funding. Studies done by the Institute of Medicine and other organizations have since demonstrated that not only did more money not translate into better healthcare, but could actually interfere with quality improvement. More judicious utilization of available services, on the other hand, often resulted in better quality healthcare. Lower utilization rates are now being considered a hallmark of quality improvement. It is important to keep in mind, however, that this may well be true for high-tech interventional services (such as surgeries, hospitalizations, and emergency room visits), but less so in preventive medicine where higher utilization of maintenance services (such as mammography, colonoscopy, etc.) combines increased cost with long-term quality improvement. With the development of the Vermont Health Care Uniform Data Reporting System, more specific data analysis will be possible to provide a more thorough understanding of utilization and cost patterns.
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