Health Affairs’ August Issue: Hospital Quality And Care

The August issue of Health Affairs contains a cluster of articles focusing on hospital quality and care. Other subjects covered in this variety issue: ways state vaccine exemption laws affect disease outbreaks; how states with strong health insurance rate review managed lower premiums; and characteristics of health care “super-utilizers.” State Vaccination Exemption Laws, Exemption Rates, And Disease Outbreaks In the United States, it is left to individual states to require that their kindergarteners show proof of vaccinations or have a vaccination exemption before being admitted to school. W. David Bradford and Anne Mandich of the University of Georgia analyzed how state-level vaccination exemption laws affect immunization rates and outbreaks of preventable diseases. By measuring the association between each component of state kindergarten vaccination exemption laws and state vaccination exemption rates from 2002-12, they observed that policies such as requiring health department approval of nonmedical exemption applications, physician signatures on applications, and criminal or civil punishments for noncompliance significantly affected the reduction of vaccine exemptions. The authors created an index (below) identifying the states with the most (pale blue) and least (dark blue) effective laws. West Virginia and Mississippi do not allow nonmedical exemptions and so were not indexed. According to the authors’ data, effective states had lower incidences of pertussis. St...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Costs and Spending Elsewhere@ Health Affairs Equity and Disparities Organization and Delivery Population Health Public Health Quality Health Affairs August Issue Mental Health pay-per-performance super-utilizers vaccination laws Source Type: blogs