Patient Safety and Quality

Public reporting of performance data seems to motivate and energize improvements to hospital performance

Publicly reporting a hospital's performance data appears to motivate and energize hospitals to improve or maintain high levels of performance, concludes a new study. The researchers used focus-group interviews to examine hospital staff and leadership perceptions of the impact of public reporting on quality of care. The widely expressed themes emerging from the interviews were that publicly reporting data led to increased involvement of leadership in performance improvement; created a sense of accountability to both internal and external customers; contributed to a heightened awareness of performance measure data throughout the hospital; influenced organizational priorities; raised concerns about data quality; and led to questions about consumer understanding of performance reports.

The participants in the focus-group interviews included administrators, physicians, nurses, and other front-line staff from 29 randomly selected Joint Commission-accredited hospitals reporting core performance measure data. The findings suggest that as the health care industry has moved toward greater transparency and accountability, health care professionals have responded by re-prioritizing hospital quality improvement efforts to address gaps in care. The study was supported in part by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (HS16094).

See "The perceived impact of public reporting hospital performance data: Interviews with hospital staff," by Joanne M. Hafner, R.N., M.S., Scott C. Williams, Psy.D., Rochard G. Koss, M.A., and others in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care 23(6), pp. 697-704, 2011.

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