Feature of the Month: Transparency
For the first time in history, healthcare organizations are voluntarily providing performance information in public reports that reveal the good and not-so-good. This is a significant change. Publicly disclosing this information has an enormous impact on both consumers and healthcare organizations alike. How? The information enables consumers to ask informed questions, and healthcare providers hold themselves accountable for demonstrating improved outcomes.
Transparency also means that the methodology for measuring quality is revealed to anyone and made available in the public report. The methodology is like a blueprint and describes how a measure is constructed. It specifies which diagnoses are counted in the measure and how many patients must be included; it accounts for how sick the patients are and what other medical complications the patients may have; it specifies how the information about patient care is to be collected and how it is to be reported. When the methodology is transparent, you can be assured the results are reliable and comparable across all the reporting organizations – apples to apples.
There are other healthcare quality reports published by commercial enterprises and widely marketed to consumers and purchasers. Although some of these reports are extensive and use “scores” or “grades,” the methodology behind the measures is not revealed. Therefore, it is not always possible to determine how much difference there is between a high score or low score, or more importantly, how the measure was constructed. These are important details for healthcare providers to know in reconstructing their processes to produce better patient outcomes. Without the methodology, it is harder to hold them accountable for improvement.
Transparency is what makes a public report on healthcare quality performance trustworthy. Residents of Wisconsin should be pleased to learn the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality and CheckPoint are committed to transparency in the quality measures they collect and report.