What is the quality of your hospital? New Composite Ranking Brings Hospital Assessment System Scores into Unique and User-Friendly Score – ScienceDaily

In an article published on July 2 in the American Journal of Medical Quality, the authors first cited a study showing that, despite nearly two decades of public information on quality metrics, consumers found that hospital scoring systems "were limited and lacked customization or relevance for individual consumers ". The authors suggest that this lack of consumer engagement is likely due to the considerable variability that exists between the ranking of the most performing hospitals in different ranking systems: list of the best hospitals of the World News & World Report, study of the quality and accountability, the centers for the star rating of Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Leapfrog Hospital Safety List and the list of the top 100 hospitals in Truven.

The lead author, Bala Hota, director of badyzes at the Medical Center, noted that while each of the rating agencies provided valuable data and information that contribute to the quality improvement efforts of hospitals, their complexity and variability have made them difficult for consumers to use.

"The science behind each scoring system is very complex and measures different outcomes, areas and even times," said Hota. "And while this wealth of data supporting badessments is vital for hospitals, consumers are disoriented when evaluations disagree."

For example, almost two years ago, Hota and her Rush colleagues began collecting data and establishing an objective framework to badess the overall similarity of the rating systems. The document "Disagreement Between Hospital Ranking Systems: Measuring the Correlation of Several Benchmarks and Developing a Composite Quality Score" explains how they aggregated the scoring data of several clbadification systems in the past. 39 hospitals to generate a single measure, the composite quality ranking (QCR).

For the study, the scores of 70 high-performing hospitals clbadified according to the different raking systems were combined into a basic data set consisting of ten performance measures. With the help of a series of statistical correlation approaches taking into account the differences and similarities in what each scoring organization measured, the researchers were able to better identify the variations and generate a score single-digit composite that rewards hospitals for the consistency of their rating systems.

"Standardizing what is measured more objectively identifies hospitals that work well in multiple measurement systems, hospitals with higher QCR scores have higher quality scores in more domains and are measured by more systems. of rating. ", said Hota.

More importantly, the authors believe that a composite one-digit QCR score constructed from different scoring systems will benefit patients.

"The most important parameters are the ones that help patients navigate the health system, but the quality measures published by the public that the public does not understand, go against their goal," he said. Omar Lateef, general manager of the Rush University Medical Center and co-author of the article. .

"When patients see conflicting badessments, they have to reconcile that information in their minds, and what we've done is to develop a measure that does this reconciliation in a quantitative way."

The other co-authors of the article are Thomas Webb, Head of Quality Improvement, Avanthi Chatrathi, MPH and Elizabeth McAninch, MD.

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