Oral

Dr. Carolyn Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) since 2003 and an official there since 1990, will receive the Medical Care Section’s 12th annual Avedis Donabedian award. The Section presents the Award to an outstanding leader in health care quality and equity. Through both Republican and Democratic administrations she has steered the Agency through the stormy waters of clinical appropriateness, comparative effectiveness, drug policy, health disparities, health IT and patient safety and quality. In addition to her long days in the Washington bureaucracy Dr. Clancy has continued as an academic leader of health policy, serving as Senior Associate Editor for the journal Health Services Research and on multiple editorial boards, including Annals of Internal Medicine, Annals of Family Medicine, American Journal of Medical Quality, and Medical Care Research and Review. The author of scores of publications, she has been the nation's guiding light for critical, common-sense reflection about health care cost and quality. Dr. Clancy will bring this critical thinking along with her pointed wit and dry humor to the 2011 Donabedian Lecture. She will reflect on how quality has (and has not) improved during her two decades at AHRQ. Other speakers in this session will include the Chair of the Donabedian Award Committee, Dr. Gordon Schiff, who will address how “Conservative Diagnosis and Therapy Can Hold Down Health-Care Costs and Improve Quality”.

Session Objectives: 1. Better appreciate the insights of Dr. Avedis Donabedian and the role of AHRQ and Dr. Clancy for carrying forward that agenda and experience. 2. Review the national progress made over the past 2 decades in improving quality and understand the challenges ahead. 3. Introduce the concept of “conservative diagnosis” and understand the reasons this construct is needed for safer, more cost effective diagnosis and health care.