Most Americans believe the health care they receive is the best that medicine and science can provide. Often people do get quality care - care that works well to keep them healthy and to help them recover when they are sick or injured. But research shows that sometimes people do not get quality care.
To help make sure that you are getting quality care, we have asked our local hospitals and medical offices to give quality reports. These reports tell what our local health care system is doing to measure, safeguard and improve the quality of the care they provide.
Our reports are like report cards for hospitals and medical offices. The reports tell you how a hospital or office did at giving care for certain medical conditions during a particular year, like a grade that you would've received in school. Our reports do not tell you how each hospital or office does taking care of all their patients for all medical conditions. Some hospitals and offices are better at one type of care than another. Some of the reports are from the work medical providers were doing a couple of years ago because it takes time to get all the information together and verify its accuracy. We have worked very hard to ensure that the information reported is accurate. Having math experts determine how to put the information we have into quality reports is complicated and takes a significant amount of time. If we don't have enough information about how a hospital or medical office is doing for a medical condition, we say, "Not enough information to report". A new set of reports will be available next year.
Measuring practice performance is difficult, and our health care system is just beginning to learn how to do it. Much of the performance data is derived from medical claims made by providers for payment for services and that payment claims format was not intended to be used to gather performance information. Also, if the provider does not make a claim for payment when a service is provided these methods will underestimate the providers performance.
We do not have access to all claims and so these performance measures are estimates. We use statistical tests to check to see if there are enough patients for any measure to provide a reliable estimate. If a measure does not pass the statistical test (70% reliability), we will not publish a result for that measure for that practice. Some of the measures are based on information provided by the practice directly to the performance reporting system. If a practice does not provide that data, they will score poorly no matter how well they perform. Almost all of the practices listed do provide that information.
