Patients deserve transparent measures of quality in healthcare, but a lack of standards and auditing for these measures can do more to misinform consumers than guide their choices, according to researchers from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality.
The report, "Fostering Transparency in Outcomes, Quality, Safety, and Costs," was published as part of Vital Directions for Health and Health Care, a publication commissioned by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a consortium of nonprofit institutions that advises the federal government on health issues affecting Americans.
The piece argues for better and consistent measurement and reporting standards to ensure that performance measures inform rather than confuse consumers and, appropriately classify the quality of care provided by the nation's healthcare providers.
[Also: Full list: See how hospitals scored in the new Overall Star Ratings from CMS]
The authors address additional challenges in producing reliable and valid performance measures. Challenges include the multistep process of measuring and reporting healthcare quality (every additional step in the process invites opportunities for errors), a lack of funding, and the fact that no single entity is entrusted with ensuring the validity of the entire process. Funds that could be used to further research and develop healthcare performance measures to ensure efficacy, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness are limited, they said.
The findings offer policymakers and healthcare leaders a number of recommendations. The first is to create a health data standard-setting body. Policymakers could create a single, independent organization to develop standards for healthcare performance measures and the data used to populate those measures, the authors said. The organization could emulate the Financial Accounting Standards Board, a nonprofit organization that is the designated accounting standard setter for public companies.
Building the science of performance measures would also be a positive step, they said. Policymakers can encourage funding agencies to fund research on the science of performance measures, encourage the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to continue its existing efforts, and encourage collaboration among federal agencies involved in performance measurement.
And to better communicate data to patients, policymakers can fund research on how to effectively communicate with consumers about differences in quality and costs of care, the research found.
"Better standards for performance measures are needed," said J. Matthew Austin, an assistant professor at the Armstrong Institute and study author, in a statement. "Our goal is to alert policymakers of this important topic so these measures can lead to higher quality and lower costs to better serve our patients."
Twitter: @JELagasse