Arlington-based Texas Health Resources unveiled a transparent, unbiased report Wednesday online that covers the quality and safety performance of all of its wholly owned hospitals, becoming the first system in Texas to publicly report this data.
The "Quality and Safety Report to the Community: A Transparent Report Card from Texas Health Resources," is based on third-party indicators developed by national specialty organizations based on the best current medical evidence that have been through a rigorous consensus process. THR vowed to include positive and negative indicators without censorship. The report includes a variety of metrics for certain clinical conditions, including heart attacks, heart failure, cancer and other areas of care.
"There are many hospital performance reports available, but there are very few healthcare systems in the country that publish quality indicators using third-party measures," COO and Senior Executive Vice President Barclay Berdan said in a news release. "Even fewer also publish both the positive and negative information."
THR worked closely with one of the few systems that publishes quality indicators: Norton Healthcare in Louisville, Ky. Dan Varga, MD, THR's chief clinical officer and senior executive vice president, previously held a leadership position at Norton and helped the system launch its public reporting system nearly 10 years ago.
"The team at Norton has been a great friend to us as we tried to put this together," he said of THR's efforts in a news conference, calling Norton a "model for public reporting."
THR officials decided to pursue public quality reporting for a few reasons. In the conference, Mr. Berdan said the system likes what open quality reporting will do for the following stakeholders:
• The consumer. "As a not-for-profit healthcare system, and a community resource, we believe that the consumer should know how we are performing," he said, adding that being transparent around quality and safety is "the right thing to do."
• Texas Health Resources as a system. Public reporting "drives performance improvement further," he said.
• Hospital care in general. "We hope that the quality and safety report will…contribute to a better understanding of how to assess, report and improve hospital quality and safety," he said.
Other than those benefits, the system decided to compile this quality report to further show its commitment to its community. THR sends out reports on finances and community benefit, "but we've never really put something out there that talks about the stewardship of our work," Dr. Varga said. "And that's really what this quality report meets. It meets that requirement for THR to talk to the community about the stewardship of the things we do every day to help folks."
Physician reaction
Since most of the publicly displayed data is clinical, THR's physicians were excited but "a little nervous" about the new public quality report, according to Dr. Varga. "Any time you put your information out there for public consumption, you're concerned about where you don't look quite so good."
However, the physicians are highly engaged in the reporting project, which Dr. Varga said "will really turn up the heat on our performance."
And improvement efforts among physicians are already underway. For instance, after the system started discussing moving forward with the report, the cardiovascular surgeons have gotten engaged and worked to improve heart surgery performance.
Future plans
Though the report online now is made up of static PDFs, it won't be like that for long. THR is planning an update for October that will make the quality report fully interactive.
Also, the system will update the public report periodically as the third-party organizations verify the data. However, the system will continue collecting its own data in real time to power its performance improvement efforts.
In the mean time, Dr. Varga and Mr. Berdan are encouraging other health systems and hospitals to join THR and start transparently reporting their own quality outcomes. "Jump in the water, the water's fine," Dr. Varga said. "We don't really think there's a downside around this. We think it's good for patients, we think it's good for consumers, we think it's great for inciting and really fueling performance improvement."