Question

Introduction

The Healthy People 2020 initiative of addressing social determinants of health is a high priority for improving physical fitness and healthy lifestyle choices. Factors such as lifestyle, demographics, and heredity ultimately help to determine quality of life and health for both individuals and communities (HealthyPeople.gov, 2014).

Case Study

Promoting individual and community participation in making positive lifestyle changes will require a multitiered approach. For example, empowering people to exercise and increase physical activity by walking more often is a positive behavioral intervention endorsed by Healthy People 2020. Renewed emphases on transformation of health care delivery and support of public health promotion programs by addressing lifestyle choices and healthier decision-making are fundamental drivers of social determinants. For example, the national healthcare environment is primed to support health promotion programs through recent legislative efforts that emphasize disease prevention and care coordination. This approach helps public health interventionists to design strategies and programs by promoting change and enhancing decision-making. Ideally, the call-to-action message will be reinforced with robust health education efforts on social media.

Discussion

The future of health care delivery systems will require novel approaches to meet or exceed the Healthy People 2020 initiatives. For example, Healthy People 2020 establishes a set of standards for health systems to strive toward quality outcomes grounded in evidence-based medicine (EPM). Small- to medium-sized health systems often struggle to implement new care delivery models and evidence-based practices for many reasons, including a lack of external guidelines and monitoring. As a result, clinical care delivery is fragmented at worse and health outcome are inconsistent at best. Thus, clinical care is neither evidence based nor adherent to national quality-based standards.

Conclusion

Health systems with novel models in clinical care delivery are champions of best practices. “An organizational culture that supports and encourages clinical inquiry and welcoming change will lead to improved clinical outcomes” (Hall & Roussel, 2014). The pursuit of the Healthy People 2020 is a worthy goal that can assist future health care delivery systems to develop a modern clinical and administrative infrastructure. Finally, a gap often exists between the skills and knowledge needed for implementation of these types of cutting-edge care delivery models. This type of strategic planning and focus will help reinforce EBM and best-clinical practices for the adoption of quality initiatives such as Healthy People 2020.

Question

1. How can external initiatives such as Healthy People 2020 assist health care delivery systems to implement quality-based measures to improve clinical outcomes? Provide an example with support from the text or a peer-reviewed reference.
2. Research previous Health People initiatives from 2000 and 2010. Track one of the initiatives and monitor its progress over the 10-year period. Prepare a SWOT analysis and discuss your findings in the context of measuring a quality outcome.

Answer 1

Ans) Two overarching goals—to increase quality and years of healthy life and to eliminate health disparities—served to guide the development of objectives that would be used to measure progress. Each objective has a target to be achieved by the year 2010.

- Monitor tobacco use, smoking cessation and the availability of treatment programs, environmental exposure to tobacco smoke,
adolescent attitudes toward smoking, and tobacco control laws.

GOAL:
Reduce illness, disability, and death related
to tobacco use and exposure to secondhand
smoke.

- A quantitative assessment of progress in achieving the Healthy People 2010 objectives for Tobacco Use. Data to measure progress toward target attainment were available for 40 objectives. Of these:
• Six objectives met or exceeded their Healthy People 2010 targets.
• Twenty-eight objectives moved toward their
2010 targets. A statistically significant difference between the baseline and the final data points was observed for 11 of these objectives. No significant differences were
observed for 3 objectives and data to test the significance of the difference were unavailable for 14 objectives.
• Six objectives moved away from their 2010
targets. A statistically significant difference
between the baseline and final data points was
observed for two objectives.
No significant differences were observed for four objectives.
〉 Four objectives remained developmental, and three had no follow-up data available to measure progress. Two objectives were deleted at the Midcourse Review.
〉 It also displays changes in disparities from baseline to the most recent data point.
• Of the 10 objectives with statistically significant health disparities of 10% or more by race and ethnicity, the Asian population had the best rate for 3 objectives.