Outcome Assessment and Health Care Reform
By Jonathan Skinner, Amitabh Chandra, Elliot Fisher
Summary: This paper argues that a fundamental restructuring of U.S. health care is inevitable, even if we don't know what form the new system will take. But any program providing universal coverage will still need to solve the problems of poor quality and rampant growth in expenditures, according to the authors. Some observers have argued in favor of a greater reliance on technology assessment and cost effectiveness, making sure that every dollar spent yields maximal health benefit. The authors argue that outcomes assessment, or measuring directly the efficiency of a health care system (whether hospital, physician group, or larger network) is instead the ideal approach to solving these twin problems of lagging quality and cost growth. The authors argue for a new set of assessments.
Key Concepts: comparative advantage in health care, managing inflation in health care, health care administrative structure, health care quality, health care delivery systems
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