Health Insurance
Concept and Measurement of Pediatric Value
In the new health care marketplace, families will be making important decisions concerning choice of health plan, health provider, and even accountable care organizations. Ideally, they would make these decisions using information on health care value, which comprises the relationships between patient/family-centered outcomes (the outputs of health care services) and costs of providing care to achieve these outcomes. Providing information on pediatric value will require new investments in data collection systems that include outcomes that matter to children and families and costs measured at the level of the child.Patient Reported Outcomes as Indicators of Pediatric Health Care Quality
Health care reform has increased demand for pediatric health care quality evaluations, particularly those that assess the impact of care on patient and population health outcomes. Many of today's most common childhood conditions are characterized by symptoms, behaviors, and functional limitations that are best assessed as patient reported outcomes (PROs). Although they remain greatly underutilized, PROs have the potential to improve pediatric health care quality assessment at the point of care and through system-level performance evaluations.Measures of Availability of Health Care Services for Children
The Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) mandates that measures of availability of child health services be included in the recommended core measurement set. The objective of this work was to review and evaluate measures of availability of child health services for potential inclusion in the initial core set of health care quality measures as mandated by CHIPRA.
