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Q-DART: Innovative Solutions to Target Gaps in Health Care Quality & Health Outcomes
What is Q-DART®?
The Q-DART project applies emerging analytic tools to better target gaps in the quality of care and health outcomes in diverse populations, helping decision makers more wisely allocate scarce resources. Q-DART uses an array of tools to generate data on disparities and report the data in a variety of visually compelling ways for use by health plans, public health organizations, and others concerned about improving the care that people receive.
Q-DART initially stood for "Quality and Disparities Assessment and Response Tools." With continued evolution and expansion of the Q-DART project, this definition has been dropped, and Q-DART is now a stand-alone term. Because of the project's unique approach to assessing health care quality, the term Q-DART has been trademarked.
Challenges Facing Health Plans and Provider Groups
The 2002 Institute of Medicine report, Unequal Treatment: Understanding Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, calls for health plans to play a key role in eliminating health care disparities. Numerous national and local initiatives are underway to address disparities, but progress is slow. One reason is that many health plans and the provider groups they contract with are unable to collect enough self-reported data about their members' race and ethnicity to effectively analyze gaps in quality of care and target interventions.
Health care reform goals include collecting more-complete racial/ethnic data, but reforming data collection practices could take years. Similarly, collecting needed race/ethnicity data directly from current plan members is time consuming and costly. If efforts to reduce health care disparities are to move forward now, health plans need a practical, short-term solution that is cost effective. A key component of Q-DART's toolset is a RAND-developed method to indirectly estimate the racial/ethnic characteristics of a population when self-reported data is not readily available. This tool is described below.
Q-DART Toolset
- RAND Method to Estimate Race/Ethnicity
- Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Mapping
- Pareto Analysis
- Web-based Interactive Mapping
- Web-based Mapping of Special Needs Populations
- Predictive Model for Measuring Health Literacy
- Collective Action Analysis
- Decision Support Analysis
Q-DART is a registered trademark.
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