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The Affordable Care Act is a once-in-a-generation change to the U.S. health system. It guarantees access to health care for all Americans, creates new incentives to change clinical practice to foster better coordination and quality, gives physicians more information to make them better clinicians and patients more information to make them more value-conscious consumers, and changes the payment system to reward value. The Act and the health information technology provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act remove many barriers to delivering high-quality care, such as unnecessary administrative complexity, inaccessible clinical data, and insufficient access to primary care and allied health providers. We hope that physicians will embrace the opportunities created by the Affordable Care Act that will enable them to provide better care for their patients and lead the U.S. health system in a more positive direction. To fully realize the benefits of the Affordable Care Act for their practices and their patients, physicians will design their offices for seamless care, employing new practice models and using technology to integrate patient information with professional society guidelines to keep patients with chronic conditions healthy and out of the hospital. Under the Affordable Care Act, physicians who effectively collaborate with other providers to improve patient outcomes, the value of medical services, and patient experiences will thrive and be the leaders of the health care system.

Use of price transparency information was associated with lower total claims payments for common medical services. The magnitude of the difference was largest for advanced imaging services and smallest for clinical office visits. Patient access to pricing information before obtaining clinical services may result in lower overall payments made for clinical care.

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The success of quality-improvement projects relies heavily on both project design and the metrics chosen to assess change. In Part II of this three-part American Thoracic Society Seminars series, we begin by describing methods for determining which data to collect, tools for data presentation, and strategies for data dissemination. As Avedis Donabedian detailed a half century ago, defining metrics in healthcare can be challenging; algorithmic determination of the best type of metric (outcome, process, or structure) can help intensive care unit (ICU) managers begin this process. Choosing appropriate graphical data displays (e.g., run charts) can prompt discussions about and promote quality improvement. Similarly, dashboards/scorecards are useful in presenting performance improvement data either publicly or privately in a visually appealing manner. To have compelling data to show, ICU managers must plan quality-improvement projects well. The second portion of this review details four quality-improvement tools-checklists, Six Sigma methodology, lean thinking, and Kaizen. Checklists have become commonplace in many ICUs to improve care quality; thinking about how to maximize their effectiveness is now of prime importance. Six Sigma methodology, lean thinking, and Kaizen are techniques that use multidisciplinary teams to organize thinking about process improvement, formalize change strategies, actualize initiatives, and measure progress. None originated within healthcare, but each has been used in the hospital environment with success. To conclude this part of the series, we demonstrate how to use these tools through an example of improving the timely administration of antibiotics to patients with sepsis.