Although providers are increasingly working to put more information about quality in front of patients, that information isn't much help if it's not readily actionable and understandable, according to a new paper by Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers.
The paper, published as part of a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and medicine report called "Vital Directions for Health and Health Care,'" concludes that the lack of effective measurements of transparency can misinform patients. The authors also suggest that without clarity on what quality measurements mean, hospitals and health systems aren't being as transparent as they could be.
"For over two decades, healthcare stakeholders have agreed that transparency in our industry is essential," Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, Johns Hopkins senior vice president for patient safety and quality, said in a statement. "However, now is the time to improve and make systems more robust to ensure measurements are accurate. Besides, value-based payments require valid and reliable measures to function appropriately."
The authors suggest a number of healthcare system fixes that could change how performance measures are evaluated, and ultimately insure the measures help consumers make choices rather than confuse them. Here are a number of the vital directions they write could form the foundation of a more transparent and informative healthcare system:
- Policymakers and legislators could create an independent organization tasked with developing standards for healthcare performance measures modeled after the nonprofit Financial Accounting Standards Board.
- The same policymakers can work to direct funding to agencies that expand the science of measuring healthcare performance, which would be helpful for CMS' continuing work.
- There's still a lot of work to be done when it comes to communicating this data to patients in a clear, concise manner, and getting to that point will require additional research and funding. This could ultimately contribute to a healthcare climate in which patients understand differences in quality and cost of care and how to get trusted information they need to make decisions about care.
"Despite important steps toward public reporting of the performance of our healthcare system, healthcare performance measurement has not yet achieved the desired goal of a system with higher quality and lower costs," the authors conclude. "Transparency of performance is a key tool for improving the healthcare system; however, if transparency is to serve as a tool for improvement, we need to ensure that the information that results from it is both accurate and meaningful."