Increasingly, hospitals and health systems — most recently Texas Health Resources in Arlington — are publishing their clinical data and outcomes publicly, available for patients to look at and use in their healthcare decision-making.
Why would a hospital make this data available publicly? Most would argue it's to gain a competitive advantage, and shift patients to their facility, assuming they provide higher quality services at an equal or lower cost.
However, making this data publicly available is actually more important and useful for another reason: internal accountability.
"Transparency's major societal and strategic imperative is to provide creative tension within hospitals so that they hold themselves accountable," wrote Paul Levy, healthcare blogger and former president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, wrote in blog post.
He referenced a recent HealthLeaders Media story, which quoted BIDMC's current chief quality officer, Kenneth Sands, MD. Dr. Sands said, "Transparent reporting's strongest impact has been internal. There's the overall message that we're confident enough in our performance to share information publicly, and the accountability it signals."
Mr. Levy agrees. When he started publishing BIDMC's real-time central line infection rates and other metrics on his blog in 2006, "this had nothing to do with the competition," he wrote. Instead, it is about internal pride and accountability. "Our chief of medicine, VP for healthcare quality and I felt that transparency would lead our staff to hold themselves accountable to a higher standard of care."
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