Measuring Diabetes Quality of Care: Clinical Outcomes, Cost-Effectiveness, and Patient Experience of Care

Abstract

It is widely recognized worldwide that the quality of care provided to those with diabetes mellitus is far from optimal. In order to improve care in an intentional way, it is of paramount importance to identify key aspects of diabetes care quality to target, develop valid measures of care quality to track changes over time, and use these measures to identify specific types of actions and interventions that are most likely to effectively impact diabetes quality and performance measures. Here we will discuss the strength and weaknesses of current measures of diabetes quality of care and comment on current challenges that face those engaged in this effort, either as developers of quality measures or as users of such measures in care delivery settings or in accountability organizations. For the sake of brevity, we will focus on outpatient care of adults with type 2 diabetes and limit our attention in this chapter to measures of selected clinical outcomes, cost of care, and patient experience of care.