Automated quality assessment of clinician actions and patient outcomes is a central problem in guideline- or standards-based medical care. In this paper we describe a unified model representation and algorithm for evidence-adaptive quality assessment scoring that can: (1) use both complex case-specific guidelines and single-step population-wide performance-indicators as quality measures; (2) score adherence consistently with quantitative population-based medical utilities of the quality measures where available; and (3) give worst-case and best-case scores for variations based on (a) uncertain knowledge of the best practice, (b) guideline customization to an individual patient or particular population, (c) physician practice style variation, or (d) imperfect reliability of the quality measure. Our solution uses fuzzy measure-theoretic scoring to handle the uncertain knowledge about best-practices and the ambiguity from practice variation. We show results of applying our method to retrospective data from a guideline project to improve the quality of hypertension care.

An extensive literature documents a high prevalence of errors in clinical diagnosis discovered at autopsy. Multiple studies have suggested no significant decrease in these errors over time. Despite these findings, autopsies have dramatically decreased in frequency in the United States and many other countries.

In 1994, the last year for which national U.S. data exist, the autopsy rate for all non-forensic deaths fell below 6 percent. The marked decline in autopsy rates from previous rates of 40-50 percent undoubtedly reflects various factors, including reimbursement issues, the attitudes of clinicians regarding the utility of autopsies in the setting of other diagnostic advances, and general unfamiliarity with the autopsy and techniques for requesting it, especially among physicians-in-training.

The autopsy is valuable for its role in undergraduate and graduate medical education, the identification and characterization of new diseases, and contributions to the understanding of disease pathogenesis. Although extensive, these benefits are difficult to quantify. This systematic review studied the more easily quantifiable benefits of the autopsy as a tool in performance measurement and improvement. Such benefits largely relate to the role of the autopsy in detecting errors in clinical diagnosis and unsuspected complications of treatment.

It is hoped that characterizing the extent to which the autopsy provides data relevant to clinical performance measurement and improvement will help inform strategies for preserving the benefits of routinely obtained autopsies and for considering its wider use as an instrument for quality improvement.

This report does not attempt to address the roles of the autopsy in medical education; furthering medical research; quality control within pathology; verification, second-opinion consultations, and legal documentation of findings; the bereavement process for surviving family members; or other benefits that are described in many of the sources listed in the bibliography (Appendix F). In addition to being difficult to quantify, these benefits apply primarily to teaching hospitals. To address the role of the autopsy as an outcome measure and tool for quality improvement, the report focuses on benefits likely to apply to all hospitals, such as the detection of important diagnostic errors and related quality problems.

Evidence from the United States suggests that technological change is a key factor in understanding both medical expenditure growth and recent dramatic improvements in the health of people with serious illnesses. Yet little international research has examined how the causes and consequences of technological change in health care differ worldwide. Seeking to illuminate these issues, this volume documents how use of high-technology treatments for heart attack changed in fifteen developed countries over the 1980s and 1990s. Drawn from the collaborative effort of seventeen research teams in fifteen countries, it provides a cross-country analysis of microdata that illuminates the relationships between public policies toward health care, technology, costs, and health outcomes.

The comparisons presented here confirm that the use of medical technology in treatment for heart attack is strongly related to incentives, and that technological change is an important cause of medical expenditure growth in all developed countries. Each participating research team reviewed the economic and regulatory incentives provided by their country's health system, and major changes in those incentives over the 1980s and 1990s, according to a commonly used framework. Such incentives include: the magnitude of out-of-pocket costs to patients, the generosity of reimbursement to physicians and hospitals, regulation of the use of new technologies or the supply of physicians, regulation of competition, and the structure of hospital ownership. Each team also reviewed how care for heart attacks has changed in their country over the past decade.

The book will be of enormous importance to health economists, medical researchers and epidemiologists, and policymakers.

Functional status as measured by dependencies in the Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) is an important indicator of overall health for older adults. Methodologies for outcomes-based medical-decision-making for public policy, such as decision modeling and cost-effectiveness analysis, require utilities for outcome health states. Utilities have been reported for many disease states, but have not been indexed by functional status, which is a strong predictor of outcome in geriatrics. We describe here a utility elicitation program developed specifically for use with computer-inexperienced older adults: Functional Limitation And Independence Rating (FLAIR1). FLAIR1 design features address common physical problems of the aged and computer attitudes of inexperienced users that could impede computer acceptance. We interviewed 400 adults ages 65 years and older with FLAIR1. In exit interviews with 154 respondents, 118 (76%) found FLAIR1 easy to use. Design features in FLAIR1 can be applied to other software for older adults.

Survival of patients who sustain a ventricular arrhythmia is poor but slowly improving due to in-hospital use of medications and ICDs. However, this more intensive hospital treatment has been accompanied by increased hospital expenditures, finds this study. The researchers analyzed Medicare databases from 1985 to 1995 to identify elderly patients hospitalized with ventricular arrhythmias (index admission). They created a longitudinal patient profile by linking the index hospital admission with all earlier and subsequent admissions and with death records.

During this time, about 85,000 elderly patients went to U.S. emergency departments (EDs) with ventricular arrhythmias each year. Only about 20,000 of these patients lived to be admitted to the hospital from the ED, and then about 14 percent died within the first day. From 1987 to 1995, the demographic and clinical characteristics of patients and the use of coronary angioplasty and bypass graft surgery for these patients were largely unchanged. However, the use of electrophysiology studies (EPS) grew from 3 to 22 percent and use of ICDs increased from 1 to 13 percent. A growing number of patients survived, particularly in the medium term, with 1-year survival rates increasing from 53 percent in 1987 to 58 percent in 1994, or half a percentage point each year.

At the same time, hospital expenditures rose 8 percent per year, primarily because of the increased use of EPS and ICD procedures. By 1993, Medicare was reimbursing hospitals an average of $15,627 for care for each patient during the year after admission for ventricular tachycardia/fibrillation. During the subsequent year, another $14,739 on average was spent for these patients. The increased intensity of care for these patients led to a rise in the average expenditure per patient of about $1,000 per year (in 1993 dollars) from 1987 to 1995.

There are few data from community-based evaluations of outcomes after a life-threatening ventricular arrhythmia (LTVA). We evaluated patients" quality of life (QOL) and medical costs after hospitalization and treatment for their first episode of an LTVA.

Methods

We prospectively evaluated QOL by use of the Duke Activity Status Index (DASI), Medical Outcomes Study SF-36 mental health and vitality scales, the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial (CAST) symptom scale, and resource use in patients discharged after a first episode of an LTVA in a managed care population of 2.4 million members.

Results

We enrolled 264 subjects with new cases of LTVA. Although functional status initially decreased compared with self-reports of pre-event functional status, both functional status and symptom levels improved significantly during the study period. These improvements were greater in patients receiving an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) than in patients receiving amiodarone. Ratings of mental health and vitality were not significantly different between the treatment groups and did not change significantly during follow-up. The total 2-year medical costs were higher for patients receiving an ICD than for patients receiving amiodarone, despite lower costs during the follow-up period for the patients receiving an ICD.

Conclusions

New onset of an LTVA has a substantial negative initial impact on QOL. With therapy, most patients have improvements in their QOL and symptom level, possibly more so after treatment with an ICD. The costs of treating these patients are very high.