Hospitals May Start Getting Report
Cards
A story from the December 2, 2001 Associated Press reported that the
University of Oregon has begun an experiment involving "report
cards" on
hospital performance. The article starts off by saying,
"Consumers have better information about buying cars or dishwashers
than they do about hospitals that are best able to heal their ailments,
health care critics say."
University of Oregon health care expert Judith Hibbard said, "We
know that 98,000 people die every year in American hospitals as a result
of medical errors." Hibbard goes on to say, "Most people assume
the technical level of care at any hospital is high and so quality is more
like customer satisfaction. But that's not true. Technical quality varies
a great deal."
The study is being done in conjunction with a report card system being
done in Wisconsin hospitals and compiled by the Employer Health Care
Cooperative Alliance. The organization rated 24 hospitals in the
Madison Wisconsin area on surgical and non-surgical care, assigning grades
of above average, average, or below average for the level of mistakes,
complications and deaths.
There are detractors to the idea. Dr. Lucian Leape of the Harvard
School of Public Health, co-author of a groundbreaking Institute of
Medicine national report in 1999 on hospital death rates that exposed
devastating death rates due to medical mistakes, said he fears the report
card could discourage improvements or mislead consumers. "It's a
variant of the shaming approach to child behavior. And I just think
shaming is a bad idea. It's not a good idea for school children and it's
not a good idea for hospitals either."
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