Strategic Planning & Timelines

This new Evaluation Highlight focuses on how North Carolina and Pennsylvania are testing the success of the Children’s Electronic Health Record Format’s requirements, such as usability and interoperability. The highlight also focuses onhow well these requirements support the provision of primary care to children and how readily they can be incorporated into existing EHRs.
 

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) ensures that most insurance plans (so-called ‘non-grandfathered’ plans) provide coverage for certain preventive health services without cost sharing for plan or policy years beginning on or after September 23, 2010. This includes screening for colon cancer for adults over 50, Pap smears and mammograms for women, well-child visits, flu shots for all children and adults, and many more services. This report examines the impact of ACA’s expanded preventive services coverage to date.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has released its annual report on progress and opportunities for improving health care quality and reducing health care disparities. This report focuses on national trends in the quality of health care provided to the American people and the prevailing disparities in health care delivery as it relates to racial factors and socioeconomic factors. It is important to note that the report provides a snapshot of health care prior to implementation of most of the health insurance expansions and consumer protections included in the ACA and serves as a baseline against which to track progress in upcoming years. This year’s report also provides expanded analyses of people with disabilities, including children with special health care needs and adults with multiple chronic conditions.
 

The ACA was passed against a backdrop of decades of rapid growth in health care spending in the United States. While much of this historical increase reflects the development of new treatments that have greatly improved health and well-being, there is widespread agreement that the system suffered from serious inefficiencies that increased costs and reduced the quality of care that patients receive. A key goal of the ACA was to begin wringing these inefficiencies out of the health care system, simultaneously reducing the growth of health care spending – and its burden on families, employers, and state and federal budgets – while increasing the quality of the care delivered. This report analyzes recent trends in health care costs, the forces driving those trends, and their likely economic benefits.