The American College of Physicians has released a policy paper in support of increased healthcare transparency.
“We believe that increasing transparency in the healthcare system can be beneficial to both patients and physicians,” said J. Fred Raslton, Jr., MD, FACP, the ACP's president. “However, unless the transparency information that is collected meets certain criteria, it will not accomplish the goal of improving healthcare.”
"Healthcare Transparency – Focus on Price and Clinical Performance Information" is the first in a series of policy papers about transparency. It offers an introduction and overview of the issues and challenges faced with increased healthcare transparency.
ACP officials say they believe the potential benefits of healthcare transparency will be realized if the reported information is:
- Reliable and valid;
- Transparent in its development;
- Open to prior review and appeal by the physicians and other healthcare professionals referenced;
- Minimally burdensome to the reporting physician or other healthcare professional; and
- Comprehensible and useful to its intended audience, including a clear statement of its limitations.
The policy paper lays out 13 new recommendations for how these goals can be met. The recommendations are broken into two areas of transparency information: price transparency and clinical performance transparency.
“Until they have access to accurate and useful information about what they are purchasing, both regarding price and clinical performance, patients will not have the ability to make truly informed decisions regarding their healthcare,” Ralston said.
Recommendations for price transparency include:
- Any methodology used to publicly report price is also transparent, and contains adequate protections to ensure the reporting of reliable and valid price information.
- Price information provided to patients/consumers should be readily available, presented in a manner that is easily understood and reflective of its limitations.
- Price should never be used as the sole criterion for choosing a physician or any other healthcare professional. Price should only be considered along with the explicit consideration of the quality of services delivered and/or the effectiveness of the intervention.
Recommendations for clinical performance transparency include:
- The qualities of a good performance measure as reported in the ACP policy paper, “Linking Physician Payment to Quality Care.”
- The importance of “process transparency” in the public reporting of healthcare performance information – the explicit delineation of the methodology and evidence base used to develop the measures being reported.
- The importance of physicians and other healthcare professionals in having timely access to assessed performance information prior to public reporting and the availability of a fair and accurate appeals process to examine potential inaccuracies.
- Support of the “ACP Policy Statement Pertaining to Health Plan Programs to Rate Physicians” and the expansion of public reporting of physician performance differences to take into account the technical capability to report reliable, valid and useful differences.
- The use of standardized performance measures and data collection methodology, consensually agreed upon by relevant nationally recognized healthcare stakeholders, in efforts to publicly report the performance of physician and other healthcare professionals.
- And the collection of both public and private data by trusted third party entities so that physician and other clinician’s performance can be assessed as comprehensively as possible.