Quality Measures

Quality Measures and What They Mean for You
Anything that Priority Health and its providers can do to improve preventive care and overall quality has a direct impact on the cost of health insurance.

The individual physicians and groups selected for this year's Priority Health Quality Awards have achieved the highest overall scores for implementing a wide range of measures that include preventive care, control of chronic diseases and patient satisfaction. The patient-satisfaction measures rate the practices' success at giving preventive health advice and returning telephone calls in a timely way.

As you'll read, the way to achieve across-the-board improvement in quality is to improve operations throughout a practice. Here are some key examples of how these quality measures impact costs and quality of care:

Preventive Measures

Breast Cancer Screening

• Priority Health Members: 86%
• National Average: 73%

Routine screenings find cancer early, save lives and an average of $20,000 per patient with an early diagnosis.

Cervical Cancer Screening

• Priority Health Members: 93%
• National Average: 82%

By finding cancer early, routine screenings save lives and an average of $26,000 per patient.

Disease Management

Asthma Control

• Priority Health Members: 80%
• National Average: 72%

Good asthma treatment reduces emergency room visits by an average of 17% and inpatient admissions by an average of 9%.

Diabetes - Blood Sugar Control

• Priority Health Members: 82%
• National Average: 68%

Better blood sugar control saves an average of $1,180 per diabetes patient.

Diabetes - Cholesterol (LDL) Control

• Priority Health Members: 76%
• National Average: 64%

Low LDL levels cuts the risk of heart attack or premature death in half.