Health care quality destined to improve
The Washington Post
February 5, 2003
Director Seeks 'Just the Facts' To Improve Medical Care
By David Brown
It is an embarrassing but no longer well-kept secret that despite health care spending of about $1.3 trillion a year -- including about $25 billion in federally funded research -- many Americans receive medical care that is not terribly good.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) enters a new phase of its occasionally rocky journey with the appointment expected today of Carolyn M. Clancy, 49, as the fourth director since its founding in 1989.
As Clancy sees it, AHRQ has two big challenges. One is to help develop the "evidence base" of medicine -- the raw material of better care. The second is to identify the best ways to get doctors and nurses to use optimal, up-to-date treatments.
The first effort acknowledges that the body of medical research on just about any important subject is vast -- too big for the average practitioner to grasp. Over the past 15 years, however, there has emerged a set of rules and methods by which a team of experts examines all the studies on a given question, evaluates their validity (combining numerous ones, on occasion, to increase the statistical power of the results) and ultimately extracts conclusions -- the "best evidence" -- from the mass of information.
This work is expensive and laborious. Health care organizations and professional societies cannot easily do it. Consequently, AHRQ has helped establish "evidence-based practice centers" at 13 universities, and is paying researchers there to create "systematic reviews" of many topics.
She describes the second challenge as the effort to figure out "what systems or strategies make the right thing to do the easy thing to do."
AHRQ is paying for dozens of studies of how clinics and hospital systems improve care, vaccination rates and patient satisfaction, and reduce waiting time, overlooked lab results and medication errors.
Carolyn Clancy, M.D.:
"The key is information. Making information available at the point of care when you need it."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26125-2003Feb4.html
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services press release: http://www.ahcpr.gov/news/press/pr2003/clancypr.htm
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality: http://www.ahcpr.gov/
Comment: The appointment of Carolyn Clancy as director of AHRQ is an important step forward for improving the quality of our health care system. She understands the issues that will make our system a better system for those who matter the most: the patients. Her strong, patient-oriented values are exemplified by the fact that she is a former president of Physicians for a National Health Program.