What Other Nations Can Teach Us About a More Patient-Centered Health Care System

The U.S. isn’t alone in efforts to improve the quality of health care. Other countries as well are coming up with new ways to measure quality, working to improve patient safety, and experimenting with financial incentives to encourage physicians to meet or exceed quality targets.

What are some other nations learning that would enhance quality improvement efforts here at home? What pitfalls can we avoid? What are some ways to overcome resistance to change? Are other countries measuring quality in ways that we haven’t thought of in the U.S.?

To help answer these questions and more, The Commonwealth Fund, in cooperation with Alliance for Health Reform, sponsored a November 4 Capitol Hill briefing. Topics and presenters were: “National Hospital Quality Benchmarking in Germany” by Christof Veit, M.D., of ESQ Hamburg; “The Patient Safety Agenda in the United Kingdom” by Sir Liam Donaldson of the U.K. Department of Health; “Using Financial Incentives to Promote Quality Improvement: The U.K. Experience” by Martin Marshall, M.D., of the University of Manchester; and a lunch roundtable on “Are There Opportunities for the U.S. to Learn from Looking Abroad?” The roundtable was moderated by one nationally known health economist, Gail Wilensky of Project HOPE, and featured another, Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton University, as well as the Honorable Roy J. Romanow of the University of Saskatchewan and Peter Sawicki, M.D., of the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care. Karen Davis, president of The Commonwealth Fund, offered closing remarks. Key U.S. congressional staff members offered comments on the presentations.

Transcript

Full Transcript (Adobe Acrobat PDF)

Speaker Presentations

Christof Veit (Adobe Acrobat PDF)
Martin Marshall (Adobe Acrobat PDF)