Gaining Actionable Insights from Your Hospital’s Publicly Reported Grades

In the 1980’s, the Healthcare Finance Administration (today, known as CMS), launched an era of transparency when they began publishing death rates among hospitals nationwide.  Years later, the Institute of Medicine reported that 98,000 Americans die annually from medical errors.  Today, the amount of healthcare performance data publicly reported has exploded.  To put the vastness of ratings into perspective, Google returns 69,800,000 results in 0.46 seconds when searching “hospital quality ratings.”  While this level of transparency serves true benefit to consumers, patients, payors and providers on many levels, it also poses confusion and difficulty for many.

A recent article in Health Affairs evaluated 850 hospitals across four major consumer ranking profiles and found that every hospital was ranked a high performer in at least one of the methodologies, while only 10% of the hospitals were rated as high performers among two or more of the ratings. Furthermore, the article noted a 2007 study that consumers were more likely to be confused than informed by five major online hospital reporting services.

And with more than 150 metrics published across a myriad of consumer websites, many healthcare quality leaders are struggling just to keep up with the volume and extreme variation among them.*  No doubt, these trends have serious financial, operational, and reputational implications.

A3 Healthcare encourages C-suite leaders to prioritize this new and emerging work scope for their hospitals to compete in the marketplace.

Here are three tips for leveraging your hospital’s performance ratings:

1. Prioritize and focus on the most influential ratings organizations.

2. Get ahead of the ratings release dates and develop a proactive approach Download Public Profile Calendar

3. Work with quality experts to regularly synthesize and strategize improvement opportunities across performance scores.

To learn more about gaining these powerful insights, click here for more information on A3’s Publicly Reported Hospital Performance Profile tool now.