Will There Be Future Reports? What Else Will Be Included?

We will publish our reports twice yearly, the next one in June, 2009. Our reports will continue to share our region-wide and practice-level achievement and to compare our data with national benchmarks.

Later in 2009 or early in 2010, the Checkup will begin to include our first results on the care of patients with heart failure. We also are committed to including results for our patients with high blood pressure and coronary heart disease. In addition, we will begin to report selected aspects of our region’s hospitals’ achievement in the care and outcomes of patients with chronic health conditions, including patients’ experiences with their preparation for returning to the community following hospital discharge.

As more practices in our community gain access to electronic tools to measure their achievement, we expect to be able to describe a larger proportion of the region’s residents. Our Leadership Team has begun to explore cost-effective alternatives for measurement for those practices without electronic medical records. These approaches will permit practices to measure and track their results on all of their patients to better understand how they and their patients are doing – and more importantly, to use the information to continually improve their patients’ health.

Finally, we are exploring ways in which we might augment our current measures to include serious, expensive, and potentially avoidable outcomes. For patients with diabetes, as examples, we seek to provide care that would reduce the risk of amputations, blindness, and kidney failure – problems for which diabetes is the most common cause in the U.S.