Committee to Design a Strategy for Quality Review and Assurance in Medicare – författare

Health care for the elderly American is among our nation's more pressing social issues. Our society wishes to ensure quality health care for all older people, but there is growing concern about our ability to maintain and improve quality in the face of efforts to contain health care costs. Medicare: A Strategy for Quality Assurance answers the U.S. Congress' call for the Institute of Medicine to design a strategic plan for assessing and assuring the quality of medical care for the elderly. This book presents a proposed strategic plan for improving quality assurance in the Medicare program, along with steps and timetables for implementing the plan by the year 2000 and the 10 recommendations for action by Congress. The book explores quality of care--how it is defined, measured, and improved--and reviews different types of quality problems. Major issues that affect approaches to assessing and assuring quality are examined. Medicare: A Strategy for Quality Assurance will be immediately useful to a wide audience, including policymakers, health administrators, individual providers, specialists in issues of the older American, researchers, educators, and students.

Volume II of Medicare: A Strategy for Quality Assurance provides extensive source materials on quality assurance, including results of focus groups with the elderly and practicing physicians, findings from public hearings on quality of care for the elderly, and many exhibits from site visits and the literature on quality measurements and assurance tools. The current Medicare peer review organization program and related hospital accreditation efforts are comprehensively described as background for the recommendations in Volume I of this report. Like the companion volume, this substantial book will be a valuable reference document for all groups concerned with quality of health care and the elderly.