Improving Quality and Achieving Equity: A Guide for Hospital Leaders

Outlines the need to address racial/ethnic disparities in health care, highlights model practices, and makes step-by-step recommendations on creating a committee, collecting data, setting quality measures, evaluating, and implementing new strategies

Embracing Accountability: Physician Leadership, Public Reporting, and Teamwork in the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality

Based on interviews, presents a case study of how a "bottom-up" physician-led group of healthcare providers realized voluntary public reporting of comparative performance information as a quality improvement tool. Shares requirements and lessons learned

Addressing the Health Needs of an Aging America: New Opportunities for Evidence-Based Policy Solutions

This report systematically maps research findings to policy proposals intended to improve the health of the elderly. The study identified promising evidence-based policies, like those supporting prevention and care coordination, as well as areas where the research evidence is strong but policy activity is low, such as patient self-management and palliative care. Future work of the Stern Center will focus on these topics as well as long-term care financing, the health care workforce, and the role of family caregivers

Best Practices in Intercultural Health

This paper presents some of the background research that contributed to the discussions within the Inter-American Development Bank's policy and strategy regarding indigenous health issues. The paper's conceptual approach and good practice research helped focus the discussion on the importance of intercultural health practices to promote indigenous peoples' access to allopathic health as well as to strengthen those traditional health practices based on indigenous peoples' own knowledge, culture, social networks, institutions and ways of life, that have shown their effectiveness. The paper presents five intercultural health experiences (in Suriname, Guatemala, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia) that are considered best practices in the field. Although poorly financed, these experiences highlight the significance to indigenous peoples of health models that bridge the gap between state-financed allopathic health services and their own indigenous health systems. This study however, does not represent a medical trial on the efficacy or efficiency of intercultural health models.Afro Descendents & Indigenous Peoples, Health Care, intercultural health, health care, indigenous peoples, health care services

Transplantability In Burdened Populations: A Regional Analysis of the Robotic-Assisted Kidney Transplant Impact On Access Given Socioeconomic And Demographic Factors

Introduction/Background The social contract of health (SCOH) in America that governs healthcare interactions has listed toward provider organizations and away from the patient. End stage renal disease treatment provides an explicatory case to examine an unbalanced SCOH. The study evaluates whether the robot-assisted kidney transplantation (RAKT) technique allows for patients with higher body mass indices and of burdened socioeconomic and sociodemographic status improved access to transplant compared to traditional open kidney transplant (OKT). Methods The study set combined extant data for patients transplanted at Chicago from two data sets. Investigators used independent t-tests, chi-squared tests, survival analysis, analysis of frequencies, and bivariate correlation to ascertain differences in the RAKT and OKT cohorts from January 1, 2009, to December 31, 2018. Results The RAKT group was objectively sicker, demonstrated higher proportions of recipients with Black ethnicity, without a college degree, and lower median household income. The RAKT cohort had a markedly lower wait time for kidney transplant (499.5 days vs 822.7 days in OKT). Patients with BMI over 40 in the two groups had no statistically significant difference in length of stay, graft function, or post-transplant outcomes. Conclusions/Implications Despite the myriad of disadvantages, the RAKT cohort clinical outcomes were equivalent to OKT in most respects and superior in wait list duration. As rates of obesity and kidney disease increase, wider proliferation of tools with demonstrated efficacy in treating this population support the social contract of health. Community psychology praxis can support communities in advocating for change in the American healthcare system