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Racial Disparities High in Medicare Plans |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Numerous studies show the African-Americans receive worse quality of care relative to white Americans across a broad array of medical conditions--disparities that can significantly harm patients or reduce quality of life. A new study from Harvard Medical School and Brown Medical School shows that such disparities in care cannot simply be attributed to low-performing health plans. The research, published in the Oct. 25 Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that high-performing plans and low-performing health plans, based on four key health measures, have comparable levels of disparities in these measures while serving Medicare patients. "Across Medicare health plans, better overall quality is not consistently associated with smaller racial disparities on four key outcome measures for enrollees with diabetes, hypertension, or heart disease," says John Ayanian, MD, MPP, associate professor of health care policy and of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Brigham and Women's Hospital. The authors obtained HEDIS data for Medicare managed care plans, containing more than 431,000 observations from enrollees in 151 health plans. For the four HEDIS outcome measures the authors examined, clinical performance was approximately 7 to 14 percent lower for black enrollees than white enrollees. HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL (http://hms.harvard.edu/) Harvard Medical School has more than 7,000 full-time faculty working in eight academic departments based at the School's Boston quadrangle or in one of 47 academic departments at 18 Harvard teaching hospitals and research institutes.
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