“No international comparative report can encapsulate every aspect of a complex health care system. As described above, our sensitivity analyses suggests that country rankings in the middle of the distribution (but not the extremes) are somewhat sensitive to small changes in the data or indicators included in the analysis.
“Second, despite improvements in recent years, standardized cross-national data on health system performance are limited. The Commonwealth Fund surveys offer unique and detailed data on the experiences of patients and primary care physicians but do not capture important dimensions that might be obtained from medical records or administrative data. Furthermore, patients’ and physicians’ assessments might be affected by their expectations, which could differ by country and culture. Augmenting the survey data with standardized data from other international sources adds to our ability to evaluate population health and disease-specific outcomes. Some topics, such as hospital care and mental health care, are not well covered by currently available international data.”
Source: Eric C. Schneider et al., Mirror, Mirror 2021 — Reflecting Poorly: Health Care in the U.S. Compared to Other High-Income Countries (Commonwealth Fund, Aug. 2021). doi.org/10.26099/01dv-h208
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Page last updated August 7, 2022 by Doug McVay, Editor.