Initial Findings on Health Care Quality

Send

Just released: Health Working Paper No. 29: Health Care Quality Indicators Project - 2006 data collection update report. More information coming soon.

On completion of Phase I, the first two major technical reports of the HCQI Project were released in January 2006. The purpose of OECD Health Working Paper 22: The HCQI Initial Indicators Report is to present a set of indicators that are designed to raise questions for further investigation regarding quality of care across countries. The paper discusses the many methodological issues and solutions in comparing health care quality across countries and the key results of the paper are presented below.

Key Results of the HCQI Initial Indicators Report, OECD Health Working Paper 22

Differences across countries in quality of care indicators may exist for a broad range of reasons, including among other reasons disease incidence, prevalence of risk factors (age, gender, etc.) and actual quality of care. The HCQI Initial Indicator Set presents a set of key indicators that should be used to raise questions for further investigation on why differences exist.
No country is among the best countries on all the indicators and no country is among the worst countries on all the indicators. In addition, most countries have one or more indicators where their high performance may warrant further investigation to determine if possible “best practices” exist for modelling by other countries.
After extensive data comparability studies, the indicators recommended as suitable for use in an initial HCQI indicator set are:
- Breast Cancer Survival
- Mammography Screening
- Cervical Cancer Survival
- Cervical Cancer Screening
- Colorectal Cancer Survival
- Incidence of Vaccine Preventable Diseases
- Coverage for basic vaccination
- Asthma mortality rate
- AMI 30-day case fatality rate
- Stroke 30-day case fatality rate
- Waiting time for femur fracture surgery
- Influenza vaccination for adults over 65
- Smoking rates