With a mid-December data refresh expected on Hospital Compare, the recent release of information on value-based performance/hospital readmissions and The Joint Commission's Top Performers, consumers will begin 2014 with armloads of new data by which to evaluate their options when selecting a hospital.
The Joint Commission reports that, in general, hospital quality continues an upward trend. Its accredited hospitals in 2012 achieved 97.6 percent composite accountability on core measures — an improvement of 15.8 percentage points since 2002. Other transparency sites also reflect general improvement.
For hospitals with lower individual scores, lower aggregate scores or outlier issues that cause scoring anomalies, transparency sites can pose a double-edged sword.
By carefully reviewing the data and findings, hospitals can identify positive sound bites to share with stakeholders and reporters to help them understand the big picture of their quality performance.
1. Be sure to review all of your hospital's scores and understand how the organization has performed over time. If your hospital is following The Joint Commission's trend, odds are good you've consistently improved year over year. So if your scores went up in 24 of 28 measures last year, for instance, you've got positive news — even if a nearby competitor outperformed you on individual measures.
2. To bring context to the full data set, analyze your scores not only against your competitors, but against state and national averages as well. Telling an inquiring reporter that your hospital meets or exceeds state and national averages in 60 percent of measurement areas increases the likelihood they'll look beyond the initial "who scored best" perspective
3. Don't forget to consider your hospital's readmission and mortality rates. Though many hospitals have gotten good at "taking the test" and performing well on core measures, mortality and readmission can pose a different kind of challenge. Some popular analysis efforts, including Leapfrog and Consumer Reports, place greater emphasis on these measurements and can seemingly contradict strong core measure results.
In addition to Hospital Compare, healthcare providers and consumers (as well as reporters) can access WhyNotTheBest.org, a transparency effort of the Commonwealth Fund that produces side-by-side comparisons of 4,500 hospitals nationwide, tracks performance over time and provides numerous benchmarks. Unlike the CMS site, which provides somewhat clunky, measure-by-measure graphs among up to three hospitals, WhyNotTheBest has a nimble, intuitive interface that provides a numbered ranking in a visual format. If your hospital performs well in their analysis (which includes The Joint Commission's core measure data, but also factors in information from the CDC, AHRQ and other sources), this website can be a real boon in your tool kit for educating stakeholders and the media.
And always remind patients, reporters and other stakeholders that transparency sites are useful tools, but they only tell a part of a hospital's story, and even "refreshed" data is inherently dated. Patients making decisions about hospital care should speak with their physicians, talk to family members and friends about personal experiences, and arrange to visit their local hospitals to be truly informed consumers.