Anticlue

Quality of Care

From the Business Word this morning, Patient's don't use the data in picking providers, there is a commentary of the wsj's the informed patient by Laura Landro editorial, It's Time to Care about Ratings Data.

The editorial mentions a health-care conference that had speakers calling for investments in information technology. One example given was an EMR, to help better monitor patient care and analyze the effectiveness of the care. Eventually even to disclose that information to health-care consumers.

<-- Snipped fro wsj --->
One big barrier is that health-quality ratings don't provide much detail or information on crucial quality measures such as complication rates and medical errors, which have long been widely protected from disclosure to the public. But that could be changing. Although it will be some time before any detailed data are widely available, the new Medicare law includes a voluntary hospital quality-reporting system that will provide information to the public on 10 measures of care for three conditions -- heart attack, the chronic condition known as heart failure and pneumonia. Both Medicare and private business groups are testing payment and reimbursement methods tied to such quality measures.

The Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality has a new website www.qualitytools.ahrq.gov to help measure and improve the quality of Americans' health care.

Currently, imho, most patient decisions on the physician who cares for them is made either via word of mouth, or the outcome of an emergency situation. It would be nice if there was a better evaluation mechanism, than the same mechanism one uses to choose a restaurant.

With my previous posts yesterday, on the increase of people using the web to find health information, maybe this is an idea whose time has come.