Defining High-Quality Care

Defining high-quality health care can be difficult. With any product or service, different consumers see quality differently. Imagine a car. Some consumers care deeply about gas mileage and maintenance costs. Others look almost exclusively at safety ratings. 

Health care consumers have different quality priorities as well. Some would be very interested in knowing a hospital or physician’s complication or infection rates. Others would want to understand how often they provide routine care in line with national recommendations.  

While car buyers have long had a variety of information to help make purchasing decisions, patients have had little, if any, information to help them choose a physician, hospital or medical treatment.  

Shared Responsibility

Recently, there has been an effort to help patients and their physicians better understand differences in care. Physicians and other health care professionals have researched the best practices in medicine and determined ways to measure whether the right care is occurring at the right time. Some of this information is already available and more will be available soon.

Patients have a responsibility too. If they fail to take medications as prescribed, have recommended tests and follow doctors’ orders, they will never receive the highest quality care.