A Pennsylvania program to publicize quality and cost indices for cardiac surgeons and hospitals prompted positive changes in patient care and physician recruiting practices ( Bentley and Nash, 1998). Studies of public reporting of surgical care quality indices in New York and California noted that, while some hospital administrators were critical of the timeliness of the reporting and of the indicators reported, most believed that the reporting systems were generally accurate in describing their hospital's performance and were useful in shaping their QI efforts ( Romano, Rainwater, and Antonius, 1999 Chassin, 2002).
However, evidence from more recent State- and local-level initiatives and the Community Tracking Study (CTS) 1 is beginning to suggest that the subsequent generation of quality reports-which often include process measures-have been more useful to hospitals in shaping QI programs, although they still do not appear to affect hospital market shares to any large degree. Studies on hospital quality reporting from the late 1980s through mid-1990s, however, suggested that public reporting of hospital mortality or complication rates was not especially effective in motivating providers to implement QI programs, or in encouraging consumers to seek out higher-quality providers ( Luce et al., 1996 Berwick and Wald, 1990 Vladek et al., 1988). The State and Federal agencies, business coalitions, accrediting agencies, and health care provider organizations that created the earliest measures and reporting systems did so on the assumption that, instead of using a heavy-handed regulatory approach to motivate providers to improve care, improvements in health care quality could be accomplished by relying on the following: market pressure from individual consumers and other purchasers of health care, providers' own interest in upholding their reputations, and provider desire to avoid legal exposure that could be connected to low quality scores ( Devers, Pham, and Liu, 2004). The Delmarva Foundation for Medical Care and JCAHO recently reviewed 51 such systems ( Shearer and Cronin, 2005). Many public reporting systems have been developed exclusively for hospitals.
#Hospital compare professional
The development of standard health care quality measures and systems for reporting quality measures to the public are rooted in two events: (1) growing awareness of recent research indicating that patients receive only about one-half of the diagnostic tests and treatments they should receive according to professional guidelines ( McGlynn et al., 2003) and (2) the loss of at least 44,000 lives each year to health care errors ( Institute of Medicine, 2000).
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