National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report
Organization of the Chartbook on Healthy Living
- Part of a series related to the National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report (QDR)
- Contents:
- Overview of the QDR
- Overview of Healthy Living, one of the priorities of the National Quality Strategy
- Summary of trends and disparities in Healthy Living from the QDR
- Tracking of individual measures of Healthy Living:
- Maternal and Child Health Care.
- Lifestyle Modification.
- Clinical Preventive Services.
- Functional Status Preservation and Rehabilitation.
- Supportive and Palliative Care.
Background
This Chartbook on Healthy Living is part of a family of documents and tools that support the National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Reports (QDR). The QDR are annual reports to Congress mandated in the Healthcare Research and Quality Act of 1999 (P.L. 106-129). These reports provide a comprehensive overview of the quality of health care received by the general U.S. population and disparities in care experienced by different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. The purpose of the reports is to assess the performance of our health system and to identify areas of strengths and weaknesses in the health care system along three main axes: access to health care, quality of health care, and priorities of the National Quality Strategy.
The reports are based on more than 250 measures of quality and disparities covering a broad array of health care services and settings. Data are generally available through 2013, although rates of uninsurance have been tracked through the first half of 2015. The reports are produced with the help of an Interagency Work Group led by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and submitted on behalf of the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Chartbooks Organized Around Priorities of the National Quality Strategy
- Making care safer by reducing harm caused in the delivery of care
- Ensuring that each person and family is engaged as partners in their care
- Promoting effective communication and coordination of care
- Promoting the most effective prevention and treatment practices for the leading causes of mortality, starting with cardiovascular disease
- Working with communities to promote wide use of best practices to enable healthy living
- Making quality care more affordable for individuals, families, employers, and governments by developing and spreading new health care delivery models
Healthy Living is one of the six national priorities identified by the National Quality Strategy (http://www.ahrq.gov/workingforquality/index.html).
The National Quality Strategy has identified three long-term goals related to healthy living:
- Promote healthy living and well-being through community interventions that result in improvement of social, economic, and environmental factors.
- Promote healthy living and well-being through interventions that result in adoption of the most important healthy lifestyle behaviors across the lifespan.
- Promote healthy living and well-being through receipt of effective clinical preventive services across the lifespan in clinical and community settings.
The broad goal of promoting better health is one that is shared across the country, whether it is promoting healthy behaviors, such as being tobacco free, or fostering healthy environments that make it easier to exercise and get access to healthy food. Successful efforts to improve these health factors rely on implementing evidence-based interventions through strong partnerships between local health care providers, public health professionals, and individuals.
Chartbook Contents
This chartbook includes:
- Summary of trends across measures of Healthy Living from the QDR.
- Figures illustrating select measures of Healthy Living.
Introduction and Methods contains information about methods used in the chartbook. A Data Query tool (http://nhqrnet.ahrq.gov/inhqrdr/data/query) provides access to all data tables.
