Quality care: standards, practices, and outcomes

Quality Care

Although there are several considerations one must weigh prior to defining medical care quality, one of the most effective definitions of this term is that care which ultimately achieves the greatest benefit while taking the lowest risk in doing so. In many ways, this notion is at the heart of the Affordable Care Act, for the simple fact that one of the principle components of this act is to emphasize preventative care since insured people's "policy will cover more than 60 preventive tests and treatments as required" (Glasserman and Hensel, 2013). Virtually no one can argue with the fact that there is a low risk associated with providing preventative care and, if implemented correctly in a safe care delivery model, it can also achieve the greatest benefit to individual health care patients, the system itself, and to the country as a whole. Thus, the prudent researchers of medical care quality in the U.S. can understand that the focus of care towards preventative services has helped address the goal of providing quality service to health care patients.

The motives for this facet of the Affordable Care Act are interesting to deconstruct when analyzing how it has prioritized the health care system in this country to one which is providing better quality to its dependents. Prior to the implementation of this act, the U.S. health care system and other industries (such as the pharmaceutical industry and certain aspects of technological industries that provided the hardware and software for many medical procedures) were spending massive amounts of dollars to account for a population in which wellness was not the prime consideration. Instead, like most every other facet of the U.S., the healthcare industry here prioritized its business concerns and making profits for virtually all participants involved.

The Affordable Care Act represents a serious reprioritization because it makes a substantial amount of preventative care for patients free. In the years before all of the different phases of the act were passed, patients were given the opportunity to take a free physical examination each year. Additionally, there were several components of the physical -- such as blood work and other preventative maintenance that were also included free of charge. The logic behind the issuing of these services was fairly straightforward. By doing more preventative work, the health care system would have the opportunity avoid more costly and serious work later on -- which, of course, could have been detected earlier and treated easier had there been sufficient preventative work done.