The U.S. lacks robust national- and state-level indicators about children’s and adolescents’ health status and care that can provide reliable guidance on questions such as whether children are thriving and whether investments in publicly financed health care programs like Medicaid are leading to improvements in their well-being, according to a new report by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council. Researchers must examine data drawn from a variety of federal and state sources that often lack standardization, hindering researchers’ ability to aggregate data, or lack information on specific groups, such as minorities or youths with disabilities, the report states.
To improve data sources and measures for children and adolescents, the report recommends the U.S. set shared health and heath care quality goals; develop annual reports and standardized measures for existing data sets; create new measures and data sources in priority areas; improve data collection, reporting and analysis methods; and improve public and private capacities to use and report data. The Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 directed the IOM and NRC to evaluate the status of efforts to measure child and adolescent health and health care quality.
[ via AHA News Now ]
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