DENVER — Colorado ranked No. 6 in the U.S. in overall health system performance, according to a new health scorecard looking at health care across the U.S.
The “Scorecard on State Health System Performance” from the Commonwealth Fund aims to identify health care deficiencies that could be made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Colorado just missed the Top 5 performers, which include Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Iowa and Connecticut.
The scorecard uses the most currently available data to assess all 50 states and Washington, D.C. on 49 health care measures covering access, quality, service use, costs of care, health outcomes and income-based health care disparities.
Specifically, those indicators were broken into categories. Those categories were “Access and Affordability,” which included things like rates of insurance coverage. “Prevention and Treatment” included measures like preventative care and mental health care. “Potentially Avoidable Hospital Use and Cost” included reducing emergency department use through effective care and per-person spending among Medicare beneficiaries and working-age adults. Another category, “Healthy Lives,” includes measures of health status, premature death and state public health funding. States were also ranked on income disparity and how health outcomes differed between low-income populations and higher-income populations.
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