Measuring Medicare Quality and Spending: A New Comparative Tool
Health care quality and spending are national concerns, but the delivery of care is local. Quality of care and spending vary widely across geographic areas, and more spending is not always associated with higher quality of care or better health outcomes. To enable comparisons at the local level, The Commonwealth Fund announces a new online tool, the Quality–Spending Interactive.<br /><br />
As explained in a new blog post by the Fund’s Eric Schneider, M.D., Douglas McCarthy, David Radley, and Susan Hayes, the new tool helps reveal the “relative value” of care—the quality achieved per amount spent—for people 65 and older enrolled in traditional fee-for-service Medicare.<br />
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Users first choose a health care setting, such as hospitals, and then select a quality measure, such as 30-day readmission rate, to view quality and spending performance for a given state or local area. The relationship between quality and spending is displayed on a scatter plot and map. You can also compare locations and see how a region performs relative to the U.S. median.<br />
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Explore the interactive and share your views about it with us.