Press
Releases
American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Commends The
Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System
for its National Scorecard Report.
Philadelphia, September 20, 2006
The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and ABIM Foundation recognize
The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System
for its unsettling report (9/20/06) on the condition of our nation's
health care system as compared to the rest of the world.
The Commonwealth Fund Commission Scorecard findings are significant - and very
disturbing. Our health care system is desperately in need of major
overhaul. Improving patient outcomes requires a degree of coordination
and organization that our health care system currently lacks - and
that our financing system often undermines.
Our nation needs new models of care that promote prevention, coordination and integration - that
link together patients, care teams and information - and a financing
system that supports such patient-centered care. We must reduce waste
and inefficiency which drive up health care costs - failure to do
so makes quality health care unaffordable and unavailable to many
across our nation.
Internists - and all primary care clinicians -
work at the nexus of this broken system. But rather than wait for
a "system fix," ABIM is providing physicians tools, via board certification,
to: assess their own clinical performance; glean feedback from patients
and colleagues; evaluate their own system infrastructure, including
IT; and get objective feedback about their knowledge base, diagnostic
acumen, and clinical judgment. ABIM is also examining ways to enhance
its programs in order to support physicians in becoming more efficient
(See "Taming Health Care Inefficiency: Physicians and Others Explore
Solutions" at www.abimfoundation.org/publications).
We applaud the Commission for providing us with a comprehensive, comparative set
of measures to use as a basis for improving the performance of our
nation's health care system. We will continue our work with physicians,
policy makers and other stakeholders to promote coordinated, efficient
and high quality patient care, and to help build a strong and viable
health care delivery system. Our patients deserve nothing less.
About ABIM Foundation
The ABIM Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to reflecting and supporting medical professionalism, physician leadership, science-based medicine, and health care of the highest quality. Its mission is to advance medical professionalism and physician leadership in quality assessment and improvement by: exploring what it means for physicians to be professionals; stimulating physicians to become involved in quality assessment and improvement; bringing diverse groups of leaders together to enable dialogue and consensus; and promoting research into the science of quality evaluation and improvement.
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