Improving women's quality of care for cardiovascular disease and diabetes: the feasibility and desirability of stratified reporting of objective performance measures.
Despite growing recognition of significant morbidity and mortality among women from cardiovascular disease, management of primary and secondary cardiac risk factors continues to be suboptimal for many women. Although there is a good deal of room to improve the care for cardiovascular disease and diabetes in men, existing gender differences in performance suggest much can be gained by specifically assessing and monitoring quality of care for these conditions in women. In this paper, we describe recent work showing gender differences in quality of ambulatory care in managed care plans with some plans having substantial gender differences on widely used measures of the quality of primary and secondary prevention of cardiac disease. We then discuss potential benefits of and barriers to routine reporting of objective measures of the quality of care, such as Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS) measures, by health plans.
D003920:Diabetes Mellitus / Q000517:prevention & control*; D005260:Female; D006331:Heart Diseases / Q000517:prevention & control*; D006801:Humans; D008329:Managed Care Programs / Q000592:standards*; D011314:Preventive Health Services / Q000592:standards* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011322:Primary Prevention / Q000592:standards*; D019984:Quality Indicators, Health Care; D012737:Sex Factors; D014481:United States; D014932:Women's Health Services / Q000592:standards*