“Attitudes of hospital leaders toward publicly reported measures of health care quality” was chosen because it dealt with the attitudes of leaders of American hospitals about the hospital quality measures found on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Hospital Compare website. The researchers particularly sought to assess whether there is a relationship between hospital leaders’ attitudes toward quality improvement measures and hospital performance. The research contained in this paper corresponds to one of the current trends in health care quality, specifically the importance of making health care quality measures publicly available and transparent.
First, the researchers highlighted the importance of having health care quality measures as well as the importance of making these publicly available. They argued that public reporting policies would make information about health care quality more transparent. Second, in this research the researchers choose to examine the quality measures found on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Hospital Compare website. These measures included performance measures relating to (1) care processes, such as the percentages of hospitalized heart attack patients that were treated with beta blockers; (2) care outcomes, such as readmission rates for those previously treated for heart attack; (3) the patient’s perspective in terms of their experience of care and their satisfaction with the care they received; and (4) measures related to the costs of hospitalization and the volume of different kinds of cases.
Having these kinds of measures publicly available were theorized to help people make more informed choices about where to get their health care but most importantly to stimulate improvement in the care provided by health care professionals. They theorized that those hospital leaders that had a more favorable attitude towards the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Hospital Compare quality measures would have a greater commitment towards quality improvement and would therefore have better performance on these health care outcomes.
The results of their empirical analysis provided some support for their hypotheses. On one hand, they found that the public reporting of quality measures was important for hospital leaders although the researchers found that “respondents expressed concerns about the clinical meaningfulness, unintended consequences, and methods of quality measures” (p. 1908). However, on the other hand, the researchers found no relationship between hospital leaders’ attitudes toward quality improvement measures and hospital performance, although they reported that hospitals with above average performance were more likely to incorporate performance on quality improvement measures into their pay-for-performance plans for hospital-based physicians.
The article was well researched. The researchers started with a strong rationale for undertaking the research, which was followed by some literature on the topic. While there could have been a better review of the literature available on the topic, there was enough to provide a basis for the research. The researchers then continued with a strong methodology section, supported by two clear hypotheses. the authors clearly described how they identified the sample, the contents of the survey, and the way in which the survey was administered. This is all important for other researchers that may want to replicate this work. Additionally, the statistical procedures were clearly laid out, again making it possible for another researcher to follow step by step. The response rate was high and the sample size allowed for statistically significant responses. Overall, this allowed for some sound conclusions to be drawn from this paper. The main conclusion is that hospital leaders are paying attention to publicly reported quality measures, although whether this leads to better outcomes is still up for debate.
References
Lindenauer, P. K., Lagu, T., Ross, J. S., Pekow, P. S., Shatz, A., Hannon, N., & Benjamin, E. M. (2014). Attitudes of hospital leaders toward publicly reported measures of health care quality. JAMA internal medicine, 174(12), 1904-1911.
