Publish First; Then Prosper or Perish
This is from the Wall Street Journal:
For two decades, a Pennsylvania agency has published “medical outcomes” — death and complication rates — from more than 50 types of treatments and surgery at hospitals. The state has found that publishing results can prompt hospitals to improve, and that good medical treatment is often less expensive than bad care.
An August 2008 study in the American Journal of Medical Quality reported that Pennsylvania in-hospital odds of death were 21% to 41% lower than those in other states.
Interesting. I’ve heard this before.
Good information like this is important to educate consumers, improve commerce, drive innovation, and ultimately to defend democracy.
Lack of information retards innovation, harms commerce, and usually ends up in some sort of government takeover (in the guise of consumer protection).
Good post!
Once bad results are made public, the hospitals with the bad reports tend to be embarrassed and they clean up their act — at least partially.
In hospital mortality is not necessarily a good indicator of health outcomes. It is a fairly rare event, and quicker but sicker discharge means that one must consider post-discharge mortality, disability status, and readmission rates to get a good picture of what is going on.
For example, a 2008 paper by Aujesky et al. looked at length of stay for patients with pulmonary embolism in Pennsylvania in 2000 to 2002. They found that “Patients with a very short LOS [length of stay in hospital] had greater postdischarge mortality relative to patients with typical LOS…” Also, they found that “the odds of discharge decreased notably with greater patient severity of illness and in patients without private health insurance.”