Hospital’s quality report cards fail to force improvements
November 27, 2009 by Carol KatarskyPosted in: Health care/Treatment trends, Hospital Management, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Practice Management
Publicly airing data showing how well — or poorly — hospitals perform seems like it would spur even the high performing organizations to improve scores. But it doesn’t.
That’s the surprising take-away from a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study looked at Ontario hospitals and measured their performance at treating cardiac patients before and after quality report cards were released. The hospitals showed no significant improvement in patient outcomes.
More troubling, most of the hospitals in the study did take steps to improve the quality of care following the release of the report cards. But overall quality didn’t improve. The study authors suggest that may be due to hospitals focusing their improvements on a few key indicators in which they had been lagging.
The end result may be some minor improvements, but not enough to budge the overall quality rating, the study concluded.
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Tags: Journal of the American Medical Association, Ontario, patient care, patient outcome, quality, report cards
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