Hlth Care Qual: Rec Pol Issues

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course provides an introduction to how public policy can be used to improve health care quality and the public reporting of quality. Topics include: (1) Quality of care under the COVID-19 pandemic, including the effects of forgoing care; (2) Racial/ethnic disparities in quality—did they persist before COVID?; social determinants of health; (3) quality of care under the rise in telehealth; underserved communities and access to telehealth; (4) The Opioid Epidemic; (5) The National Quality Strategy under the Affordable Care Act (ACA); quality under "Medicare For All" proposals; the Quality Payment Program in Medicare; the quality of Medicaid; (6) Designing incentives for rewarding quality: pay-for-performance models versus behavioral economic models (Nudge Theory, default theory, peer group effects, shame); shared-savings models; accountable care organizations (ACOs) and other Alternative Payment Models; (7) Protecting the patient: patient safety and medical errors; the Checklist Manifesto; alternative tort reforms, the Apology Initiative; payment policies for hospital-acquired conditions and readmissions; (8) Coordinating care: electronic health records and digital health care; interoperability of IT; the medical home model; bundled payment design; (9) Measuring preventive care quality: debates over screening guidelines; the science of measuring the cost offsets and outcomes of preventive care and pharmaceuticals; (10) Reporting quality: report cards; consumer use of public reports; physician use of internal reports; crowd-sourced quality ratings; (11) Measuring overuse, underuse, waste, and the costs-savings from quality; geographical cost and quality variation; (12) Current policy issues in personalized medicine and genomics; and (13) The impact of insurer/provider competition and consolidation on quality. By the end of the course, students should be able to think critically about the key health policy issues related to improving healthcare quality.