Medicare

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.

Table of Contents

• Front Matter
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to the Study and the Report
• Medicare
• Summary
• 1. Health, Health Care, and Quality of Care
• 2. Concepts of Assessing, Assuring, and Improving Quality
• 3. The Elderly Population
• 4. The Medicare Program
• 5. Hospital Conditions of Participation in Medicare
• 6. Federal Quality Assurance Programs for Medicare
• 7. Quality Problems and the Burdens of Harm
• 8. Settings of Care and Payment System Issues for Quality Assurance
• 9. Methods of Quality Assessment and Assurance
• 10. Critical Attributes of Quality-of-Care Criteria and Standards
• 11. Needs for Future Research and Capacity Building
• 12. Recommendations and a Strategy for Quality Review and Assurance in Medicare
• Acknowledgements
• Index
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