Consumer-based benchmarking methods are in need of more transparency and validation, according to authors of a new study in the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety who identified data discrepancies when it came to rates of false-positive events, particularly among high-transfer and high-volume hospitals.
Lead author Bala Hota and the team of researchers were inspired to examine the issue after Rush University Medical Center in Chicago received the lowest possible patient safety ranking, a 1 out of 5, in the U.S. News and World Report's "Best Hospitals" rankings for 2015-16. The authors compared the data from that report to their own internal data.
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What they found is that the U.S. News data showed a lot more patient safety events, like pressure ulcers, nearly all of which had been present at the patient's admission. Hota and company suspected a broader problem, so they analyzed similar data on a sample of hospitals and found that RUMC wasn't the only organization with data discrepancies. False-positive event rates were common among high-transfer and high-volume facilities.
Discrepancies were found in areas such as PSIs for pressure ulcer rates, perioperative hemorrhage or hematoma rate, and postoperative respiratory failure.
U.S. News has responded, making changes to its methodology and data sources this year. The new methodology places less emphasis on the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's PSIs when assessing hospitals for quality. They also now exclude the PSI measure for pressure ulcers when assessing a hospital for safety because that particular PSI is prone to billing inaccuracies.
Twitter: @JELagasse