The health care industry wasn’t an early adopter of the well-known mantra that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” But measuring and reporting performance on indicators of patient safety and quality have contributed to some marked improvements in recent years, according to the newly released 2014 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
Released with the report is a new Chartbook on Patient Safety that summarizes trends across key patient safety measures, offers downloadable slides, and includes a data query tool with access to all data tables.
On a national level, the safety and quality of health care is improving, especially for care delivered in hospital settings and for measures that are publicly reported to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Hospital care was safer in 2013 than in 2010, with 17 percent fewer harms to patients and an estimated 1.3 million fewer hospital-acquired conditions, 50,000 fewer deaths, and $12 billion in cost savings over 3 years (2011, 2012, and 2013).
