May 9th, 2011 by DrWes in Health Policy, Research
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Quality measures. Patient satisfaction surveys. With our new health care reform law, these “performance measures” are the new black in health care.
Hospitals are currently spending, conservatively, tens of millions of dollars to bolster these “performance measures” in hopes of securing a refund of a mere 1% of payments that CMS will soon withhold from them in the name of “assuring” quality improvement.
But what if, nationwide, there wasn’t a big difference in these measures between hospitals? What happens then? Might payments then be made on political grounds?
Performance measures have been collected for some time now in anticipation of this new payment initiative by the government, so data exist to evaluate. In fact, Kaiser Health News was nice enough to aggregate the findings from our government’s Hospital Compare website for my review.
So I calculated the mean, median and standard deviation of the results of all of this data collected across 50 states and 2 territories and found very little difference in measures collected between states: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
May 26th, 2010 by StevenWilkinsMPH in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Health Tips, Opinion
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What if the average patient (person) knew what healthcare insiders, providers and expert patients know?
Take the process of looking for a new personal physician. Conventional wisdom tells people that when looking for a new physician they need to consider things like specialty, board certification, years in practice, and geographic proximity. Online services like Health Grades allow you to see and compare the satisfaction scores for prospective physician candidates.
But industry insiders know different. Consider those patient satisfaction scores for physicians. In reality, “one can assume that the quality of care is actually worse than surveys of patient satisfaction would seem to show,” according to a 1991 lecture by Avedis Donabedian, M.D.:
“Often patients are, in fact, overly patient; they put up with unnecessary discomforts and grant their doctors the benefit of every doubt, until deficiencies in care are too manifest to be overlooked.”
Given the constant drumbeat about the lack of care coordination and medical errors, it would seem that some people (patients) are beginning to reach the breaking point alluded to by Dr. Donabedian. The empowered among us are starting to compare physicians (and the hospitals that employ them) to a higher standard — a higher standard that reflects the nature and quality of the medical services physicians actually provide. Empowered patients today are “being taught to be less patient, more critical, and more assertive.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Mind The Gap*