Scholar Proposes More Transparency
April 5, 2010
The best way to reduce preventable injuries in hospitals is to require physicians to review their own performance data and compare them to the risk-adjusted complication rates of their peers, according to a nationally recognized expert.
Writing in The Commonwealth Fund's March 2010 Perspective on Health Reform, Lucian L. Leape, MD, commends the Veterans Administration's National Surgical Quality Improvement Program, which he says was developed in the 1990s and has since been adopted by the American College of Surgeons. Under the program, VA surgical specialty departments are given their own risk adjusted mortality and complication rates as well as those of all other such departments in the VA system, but on a blinded basis. The result: "below-average units made substantial improvements, leading over several years to systemwide declines in both complication rates and mortality that significantly exceeded the secular trend." For a copy of Transparency and Public Reporting Are Essential for a Safe Health Care System, visit the Fund at www.commonwealthfund.org.