BACKGROUND Hospital-specific and surgeon-specific public reporting of performance measures is expanding largely due to calls for transparency from the public and oversight agencies. Surgeons continue to voice concerns regarding public reporting. Surgeons' perceptions of hospital-level and individual-level public reporting have not been assessed. This study (1) evaluated surgeons' perceptions of...

National policies to improve health care quality have largely focused on clinical provider outcomes and, more recently, payment reform. Yet the association between hospital leadership and quality, although crucial to driving quality improvement, has not been explored in depth. We collected data from surveys of nationally representative groups of hospitals in the United States and England to exa...

INTRODUCTION Access to high-quality health care is a crucial social determinant of health. We describe the implementation of an "expanded medical home" partnering a primary care practice (the Ypsilanti Health Center [YHC]) with local school-based health centers (the Regional Alliance for Healthy Schools [RAHS]), and to assess whether this model improves access to and quality of care for shared ...

The 7 metrics articles in this issue of Preventing Chronic Disease address the following topics: public health policy (1), health care access and quality (2), social and economic determinants (3), health behaviors (4), environmental metrics (5), population health outcomes (6), and health inequalities (7). The articles differ in the degree to which they establish a conceptual framework for linki...

We present unique audit-study evidence on health care quality in rural India, and find that most private providers lacked medical qualifications, but completed more checklist items than public providers and recommended correct treatments equally often. Among doctors with public and private practices, all quality metrics were higher in their private clinics. Market prices are positively correlat...

BACKGROUND Health effects associated with air pollution are typically evaluated using a single pollutant approach, yet people are exposed to mixtures consisting of multiple pollutants that may have independent or combined effects on human health. Development of exposure metrics that represent the multipollutant environment is important to understand the impact of ambient air pollution on human ...

BACKGROUND This study evaluated the prevalence of ideal cardiovascular (CV) health in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study and determined its relationship with prevalent retinopathy, wider retinal venular diameters, and narrower arteriolar diameters, which are risk markers for subclinical cerebrovascular disease and are associated with increased stroke and coronary heart disease (CHD) ...

BACKGROUND Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the world. In 2010, a goal released by the American Heart Association (AHA) Committee focused on the primary reduction in cardiovascular risk. METHODS Data collected from 7683 men and 7667 women aged 18-69 years were analyzed. The distribution of ideal cardiovascular health metrics based on 7 cardiovasc...