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Health Policy and Health Promotion

The Affordable Care Act

The ACA is a healthcare reform passed into law by President Barrack Obama in March 2010. It was tailored to expand health coverage to millions of uninsured Americans. The ACA created a Health Insurance Marketplace, expanded Medicaid eligibility, and banned insurance companies from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions (McIntyre & Song, 2019).

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Besides, it required every insurance plan to cover a list of essential health benefits. The ACA also allowed states that chose to expand Medicaid coverage to a wider range of citizens. Furthermore, the ACA includes premium tax credits and cost-sharing reductions to reduce costs for lower-income persons and families (Crowley & Bornstein, 2019). As a result, low-income families qualify for subsidies for insurance covers purchased through the Marketplace.

Team STEPPS

Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (STEPPS) refer to a systematic approach created by the Department of Defense (DoD) and the AHRQ to incorporate teamwork into practice. It is intended to improve health care’s quality, safety, and efficiency (Buljac-Samardzic et al., 2020).

It institutes tools and strategies to enhance team performance in health care. Team STEPPS seeks to optimize patient outcomes by enhancing communication and teamwork skills among health care providers (Clapper, 2018).

It focuses on skills that support team performance principles, including behavioral methods, training requirements, human factors, and cultural change tailored to improve quality and patient safety.
The United States Preventive and Safety Task Force

(USPSTF)

USPSTF is an independent, volunteer board of national experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine. USPTF seeks to improve peoples’ health countrywide by developing evidence-based recommendations on clinical preventive services such as counseling services, screenings, and preventive medications (USPSTF, 2020).

The recommendations are derived after a thorough review of existing peer-reviewed evidence (Mabry-Hernandez et al., 2018). They aim to help primary care providers and patients collaboratively decide whether a preventive intervention suits a patient’s needs (Mabry-Hernandez et al., 2018). The USPSTF allocates each recommendation a letter grade as per the strength of the evidence and the balance of benefits and harms of the preventive intervention.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)

CMS is a national bureau that is within the U.S. HHS. Its primary role is to administer the country’s major healthcare programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the state and federal health insurance marketplaces (Burd et al., 2017). It also collects and analyzes data, generates research reports, and eradicates fraud and abuse within the healthcare system (Leonard et al., 2017).

CMS seeks to provide a healthcare system with better care, access to coverage, and improved health. The CMS plays a key role in insurance marketplaces by helping to execute the Affordable Care Act’s laws on private health insurance (Burd et al., 2017). Furthermore, the CMS directs the Administrative Simplification Standards of HIPAA. The adoption of Administrative Simplification Standards seeks to execute the adoption of national electronic health care records, ensure patient privacy and security, and impose HIPAA rules.

Agency of Health Research and Quality (AHRQ)

AHRQ is a U.S. government agency within the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). It functions to support research to help enhance the quality of health care. AHRQ’s mission is to generate evidence to improve health quality and safety and make it more equitable, accessible, and affordable (Kronick, 2017).

AHRQ utilizes a system of quality indicators to establish the standards of quality health care and if a provider is meeting those standards (Kronick, 2017). The indicators include Prevention Quality Indicator (PQI), In-patient Quality Indicator (IQI), Patient Safety Indicators (PSI), and

Pediatric Quality Indicators.

PQI is used to point out hospital admissions that were avoidable through higher-quality outpatient care. IQI focuses on the quality of patient care inside a hospital. The numbers indicate patient mortality rates in a hospital due to lack of care or surgical procedures due to lack of care or surgical procedures (Shin et al., 2018).

PSI focuses on the quality of care of patients in a hospital, particularly mortalities due to avoidable complications (Shin et al., 2018). Lastly, Pediatric Quality Indicators are concerned with most aspects in other indicators but focus on pediatrics.

References

  • Buljac-Samardzic, M., Doekhie, K. D., & van Wijngaarden, J. D. (2020). Interventions to improve team effectiveness within health care a systematic review of the past decade. Human resources for health, 18(1), 1-42. https //doi.org/10.1186/s12960-019-0411-3
  • Burd, C., Brown, N. C., Puri, P., &a


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