Declining high-impact clinical publication rate: A potential contributor to health disparities among persons with developmental and intellectual disabilities.

Background: Persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) suffer from stark, well-documented health and healthcare disparities, despite data indicating that the majority see a healthcare provider at least annually. Multiple surveys have indicated that over 90% of physicians feel they have inadequate knowledge and skill in caring for those with IDD. This has been recognized as a key barrier to health equity.

Roadmap for Creating Effective Communication Tools to Improve Health Equity for Persons With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.

Persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) live 20 fewer years than the average person and almost 40% of their deaths are from preventable causes. They suffer from well-documented disparities in health and healthcare, and much of this inequity is rooted in information transfer failures between patients, their caregivers, and their healthcare providers. Tools to improve communication between these stakeholders, such as health checks and hand-held health records, or health passports, have been implemented in Europe, Australia and Canada with mixed results, and there are no standard information tools currently in widespread use in the U.

What have we learned about how to measure quality of care for patients with community-acquired pneumonia?

The most commonly used measures of quality of care for hospitalized pneumonia patients are process measures as opposed to outcome measures.For a process measure to be useful in assessing quality of care, it must be linked to a desired outcome. For patients hospitalized with pneumonia, the obtaining of blood cultures, the timely use of appropriate antibiotics, and the delivery of the influenza and pneumococcal vaccines are the process measures most widely used for assessing quality of care in relation to clinical outcomes.