The purpose of this article is to examine the issue of quality of care in rural America and to help others examine this issue in a way that is consistent with the very real challenges faced by rural communities in ensuring the availability of adequate health services. Rural citizens have a right to expect that their local health care meets certain basic standards. Unless rural providers can document that the quality of local health care meets objective external standards, third-party payers might refuse to contract with rural providers, and increasingly sophisticated consumers might leave their communities for basic medical care services. To improve the measurement of health care quality in a rural setting, a number of issues specific to the rural environment must be addressed, including small sample sizes (volume and outcome issues), limited data availability, the ability to define rural health service areas, rural population preferences and the lower priority of formal quality-of-care assessment in shortage areas. Several current health policy initiatives have substantial implications for monitoring and measuring the quality of rural health services. For example, to receive community acceptance and achieve fiscal stability, critical access hospitals (CAHs) must be able to document that the care they provide is at least comparable to that of their predecessor institutions. The expectations for quality assurance activities in CAHs should consider their limited institutional resources and community preferences. As managed care extends from urban areas, there will be an inevitable collision between the ability to provide care and the ability to measure quality. As desirable as it might be to have a national standard for health care quality, this is not an attainable goal. The spectrum and content of rural health care are different from the spectrum and content of care provided in large cities. Accrediting agencies, third-party carriers and health insurance purchasers need to develop rural health care quality standards that are practical, useful and affordable.
The quality of health care provided in rural areas is critical to rural patients and providers and will shape the future evolution of the rural health care system. Past research has focused almost exclusively on disease-specific comparisons of the quality of care rendered in rural as compared with urban areas, which ignores the fact that it is the functioning of the entire system of care that determines whether or not rural residents receive high quality care. Future research should focus on the functioning of the entire rural system of care. To accomplish this objective, we suggest investments in the following areas: the creation of a national database that collects information on the process and outcome of care delivered to rural populations, the incorporation of human factors research into our research agenda, greater emphasis on the importance of sociodemographic and cultural issues to the quality of care, and a shift to a focus on populations as opposed to individuals.
This publication is part of the National Academy of Medicine's Vital Directions for Health and Health Care Initiative, which called on more than 150 leading researchers, scientists, and policy makers from across the United States to assess and provide expert guidance on 19 priority issues for U.S. health policy. The views presented in this publication and others in the series are those of the authors and do not represent formal consensus positions of the NAM, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, or the authors' organizations. Learn more: nam.edu/VitalDirections.
The economic forces that are reshaping the practice of medicine and the funding of medical research will have great impact on clinical education and research in teaching hospitals and their associated medical schools. Changes in the setting of and approach to medical education will need to be made in order to continue to train physicians at the same high level as in the past and to maintain the productivity of our national biomedical research enterprise and its contributions to health. Academic leaders, such as department chiefs who have clinical service responsibilities, are finding it more and more difficult to manage simultaneously the demands of the clinical business, education, and research. In an effort to organize a teaching hospital and a medical school in a manner that would position them to maintain more effectively their common academic mission front and center with the clinical business, Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Hospital created a joint venture in 1996. The new nonprofit Institute for Education and Research has education and research as its top (and only) mission. It is designed to provide additional and specific academic leadership and to enable the joint venture to undertake strategic planning for the academic mission. In addition to the challenges it faces from changes in the external environment, the Institute for Education and Research will need to establish a new pattern of interactions internally within the parent institutions. Collaborations with department chairs and faculty are an essential ingredient for its success. It is hoped that this structure will prove to be a useful template for organizing other medical school-hospital collaborations on behalf of the academic mission.
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