While studying quality of care in the 1990s, Mark Schuster, MD, PhD found that few studies on pediatric quality had been conducted. The typical explanation that he was given was that the federal government wasn’t funding research into quality measures because children on Medicaid don’t drive federal health-care costs nearly as much as adults on Medicaid and Medicare do.
But Schuster, chief of General Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and William Berenberg Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, believes there have been other challenges in measuring care quality in children. In an acceptance speech upon receiving the 2014 Douglas K. Richardson Award for Perinatal and Pediatric Healthcare Research, published today in the journal Pediatrics (PDF), Schuster points to factors including the relative rarity of many pediatric conditions and that many of the benefits of excellent pediatric care are not observed until adulthood. …