A Viewpoint, published in JAMA, calls for truthful, timely, and transparent public reports on quality measures and suggests that such reports be linked to those developed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services or the LeapFrog Group. Transparency is becoming the norm in US health care. With this evolution, the volume of publicly available data on health care quality has increased rapidly. Federal agencies, private organizations, health plans, state governments, and others report publicly on the performance of hospitals and physicians. However, there are no agreed upon standards for what information should be reported, its accuracy, and the underlying data that support it. All these are needed to allow the public to determine whether the measure and data are truthful, timely, and transparent. In this Viewpoint, the authors propose that hospitals and physicians adopt standards for their own public reporting of quality measures and that an external entity make transparent the extent to which reporting by each organization adheres to these standards.
Read more:
- Time for Transparent Standards in Quality Reporting by Health Care Organizations. JAMA. 2017; 318(8):701-702