Economic Efficiency

Economic efficiency and the quality link

The direct and indirect costs of poor quality care have been well established in published studies. The literature strongly suggests that the intervention of evidence-based best practices (such as those reported in our Performance & Progress Report) and information technology that supports practitioners can be related to better patient outcomes. The right care, at the right time results in improved quality-of-life for patients, all of which can reduce the need for more costly healthcare interventions later on.

Understanding this link between quality of care and cost is essential to building meaningful and useful measures of economic efficiency.

Economic efficiency measures: progress to-date

In providing healthcare coverage for their employees, businesses (or their purchasing coalitions) pay the lion's share of rising health care costs. For them, and for those who are self-insured or paying out-of-pocket, we have chosen to commit ourselves to developing new measures that accurately reflect the economic efficiency of quality care.

However, the development of these measures will not advance more definitively until we have access to a centralized, high-volume data repository from which to produce more sophisticated risk-adjusted comparisons.

Until then, we have made progress beyond reporting raw charge data. Through this Web site, we will keep you apprised of our progress in working with multiple stakeholders in the State to develop the kind of data repository and reporting tools that will produce more accurate measures of outpatient, as well as inpatient, economic efficiency. The added benefit will be the expansion of our ability to produce more accurate measures of quality performance outcomes, as well.