Health Outcomes and the Quality of Medical Care

This course will be an intensive introduction to the assessment and improvement of health outcomes and the quality of medical care. We will address two central questions: 1) How do you measure health outcomes and the quality of care? 2) How do you effect and evaluate change? Topics will include the outcomes movement and concepts of quality; scaling and scoring health status and quality of life measures and assessing validity and reliability of these measures; explicit and implicit quality measures; preventable morbidity; patient satisfaction; physician behavior; practice guidelines; physician profiling; and total quality management. Prerequisites: (Required) Descriptive and bivariate statistics, (Recommended) Multivariate statistics, Epidemiology, PP46100.