Hospital performance—ideally a way to track patient safety and clinical outcomes—can largely be determined by how metrics are measured. A new review article specifically links changes in how catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) are defined with subsequent artificially improved hospital performance scores.
CAUTIs are preventable healthcare-associated infections that are tracked as part of the federal value-based incentive programs that give financial bonuses and penalties to hospitals based on hospital performance measures reported to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention’s National Healthcare Safety Network. Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found that although hospitals have federally reported significantly improved CAUTI rates since 2015, the root-cause of this trend is not easily identified.
Using CAUTI data reported by approximately 600 hospitals to the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network, the researchers found that CAUTI rates significantly decreased by 42 percent “immediately after” federal value-based incentive programs were implemented. “While this may seem like an effect of the programs, the large decline CAUTI rates was actually due to a concurrent change in which infections “count” as CAUTI,” explained corresponding author Heather Hsu, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics. Further review reveals the updated reportable definition of a CAUTI was implemented in 2015 and no longer included certain types of infections.
According to the researchers, these findings are important because change in the CAUTI definition likely led to artificial inflation of hospitals’ performance scores unrelated to changes in patient safety.
Read more:
- The impact of measurement changes on evaluating hospital performance: The case of catheter-associated urinary tract infections. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. 16 September 2019
- Boston University School of Medicine: https://www.bumc.bu.edu/busm/2019/09/16/rethinking-how-we-measure-hospital-performance-catheter-associated-urinary-tract-infections/