Less than 20 percent of patients access public reporting information on quality of care. While many hypothesize this is due to the difficulty or inaccessibility of information, a Perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine offers a different explanation: public reporting does not include the information patients value most.
While public reporting of quality and operations information will remain important to the healthcare industry, consumers are both ill-equipped to understand and indifferent to the current publicly reported information.
The direction in which healthcare is moving is more like traditional consumer-driven industries, according to the article. Patients perceive greater benefits from information on costs-of-care, pricing systems and their application to individual cases than from information on quality, readmissions and clinical outcomes, which they may not have the appropriate context to analyze.
As the healthcare system is currently designed, clinicians have neither time nor incentives to learn the complex information necessary to advise patients on financial implications of care or to engage in shared decision-making.
A shift towards consumer-specific information could help the healthcare system lower its cost curve. While patients appear to be driving the system in a consumer-driven direction, acknowledgement of the move and a healthcare system response could make the process more efficient, according to the article.
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