The Commonwealth Fund (TCF), a private foundation headquarted in New York City and started by a woman philanthropist Anna M. Harkness and established in 1918, aims to promote (TCF 2014) “a high performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society’s most vulnerable, including low-income people, the uninsured, minority Americans, young children, and elderly adults.”
The TCF produces more than 100 publications a year. In its 2014 edition of Mirror, Mirror, a study entitled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” reports data analysed from 11 western, industrialised nations which incorporates patients’ and physicians’ survey results on care experiences and ratings on various dimensions of care. Researchers had analysed in each of those countries that related to five overall performance areas relating to Health, Quality, Efficiency, Access,and Equity.
Once again, even in the 2014 “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” report, the U.S. health care system has shown that it underperformed relative to the other 11 countries surveyed, and ranked last among them despite the U.S. spending far more on health care per capita and been the most expensive in the world.
The chart below shows how the overall rankings (click on the image to open a new tab of your current browser window to view a larger image).
Image credit : The Commonwealth Fund
Combing through the report, I found the following references to health information systems:
- timely information not reaching doctors, thus affecting health outcomes, quality, and efficiency;
- adoption of modern health information systems and meaningful use of health information technology systems can encourage the efficient organisation and delivery of health care; and
- medical records or administrative data capture important dimensions of effectiveness or efficiency, thus in any attempt to assess the relative performance of countries, medical records or administrative data captured must be included to minimise inherent limitations in similar studies when only patients’ and physicians’ assessments are used, since patients’ and physicians’ experiences and expectations which could differ by country and culture, and thus could affect findings from such studies.
References:
- The Commonwealth Fund (TCF) 2014, About Us, viewed 18 June 2014, <http://www.commonwealthfund.org/about-us>
- The Commonwealth Fund (TCF) 2014, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, 2014 Update: How the U.S. Health Care System Compares Internationally, viewed 18 June 2014, <http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2014/jun/mirror-mirror?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=>
