Hospitals are currently spending, conservatively, tens of millions of dollars to bolster these "performance measures" in hopes of securing a refund of a mere 1% of payments that CMS will soon withhold from them in the name of "assuring" quality improvement.
But what if, nationwide, there wasn't a big difference in these measures between hospitals? What happens then? Might payments then be made on political grounds?
Performance measures have been collected for some time now in anticipation of this new payment initiative by the government, so data exist to evaluate. In fact, Kaiser Health News was nice enough to aggregate the findings from our government's Hospital Compare website for my review.
So I calculated the mean, median and standard deviation of the results of all of this data collected across 50 states and 2 territories and found very little difference in measures collected between states:
Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that none of these data are skewed (means are virtually identical to the medians) and that there is very little variability (2-6%) between the data sets.The fact that these data are so similar across states is a testament to the nationwide health care quality that U.S. citizens can currently expect in America.
But these data also lead to a disturbing question: if the data are so similar across every state or territory, will similar findings hold true between hospitals? How is the average Joe or Sally (or Joe or Sally government worker) going to see a meaningful difference in performance measures between states OR hospitals when they show performance differences of as little as +/- 3%?
The realistic answer?
They can't.
This post by Westby Fisher, MD, appeared at Get Better Health, a network of popular health bloggers brought together by Val Jones, MD. Better Health's mission is to support and promote health care professional bloggers, provide insightful and trustworthy health commentary, and help to inform health policy makers about the provider point of view on health care reform, science, research and patient care.
