Measuring HIV Quality of Care

Background: The VA is the largest single provider of HIV care in the United States. The late 1990's have seen a revolution in the quality standards for this disease with the onset of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) and other developments. Objectives: Our purpose in this project is to develop a method for assessing quality in two important areas of HIV care - antiretroviral medications and opportunistic infection screening and prophylaxis - and explore the determinants of high quality care in order to suggest quality improvement strategies. Methods: The analysis has four parts. First, it will describe the level of adherence to the indicators in VA HIV patients nationwide and compare VA HIV patients to national benchmarks. Second, it will analyze facility and patient level predictors of adherence to indicators of quality of care and compare them with the predictors in the non VA population using staged logistic regressions. Third, it will seek to validate certain indicators (e.g. HAART therapy) against clinical outcomes like hospitalization and immune status. We will also model the clinical "price" that the VA pays in suboptimal clinical outcomes as a result of current performance levels. Fourth, we will compare the performance of the facilities after one year of an intensive targeted indicator-specific feedback group versus those receiving aggregate data only. Status: Data analysis.