Compare Hospital Quality
Pricing data are only one-half of the health care value equation: the other half is quality. The Hospital Price Transparency Study pairs pricing data with Medicare Stars quality ratings, but there are limitations on the insights that purchasers – especially commercial purchasers – can glean from Medicare data. But if not Medicare Stars data, then what?
This section of the website examines sources of quality data, their strengths and limitations, and offers guidance on how to pick the right measures to assess hospital value, providing a more comprehensive picture of health care in your market.
Which quality measures should you examine?
Most quality measures in wide use today are the ones easiest to measure, but they often reveal little variation in performance across providers. Moreover, these “easy-to-measure” metrics usually focus on processes (did the provider do the thing that they were supposed to do?) rather than outcomes (did the patient’s health actually improve?). The resources in this section offer a primer on quality measures: what matters, what doesn’t, and how to use quality data to assess the value of providers in your network.
October 30, 2015
Catalyst for Payment Reform
Virtual summit discussing CPR’s Employer-Purchaser Guide to Quality Measure Selection, which helps purchasers more effectively design, implement and evaluate health care delivery and payment reform programs.
August 31, 2018
Catalyst for Payment Reform
This action brief provides a summary of CPR’s selected “Quality Measures that Matter,” and describes the actions a purchaser should take to utilize quality measurement in their health care decision-making.
What are sources of quality information?
Unfortunately, there is no single authority on quality measurement; multiple resources (free and for purchase) offer conflicting views on the performance of a given health care provider. How can a purchaser sort through the various sources of provider quality ratings? Information in this section provides an overview of the different suppliers of provider quality ratings, examines how and why they differ, and can help guide you to the right resource for your organization.
June 27, 2020
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
This free suite of tools is intended to assist purchasers in creating health care quality measure sets. Users can filter through over 700 measures, and receive an alignment score for the measure set under consideration.
June 27, 2020
Employers’ Forum of Indiana
This research brief describes five categories of quality measures, offers a framework for mapping quality measures to measurement purpose, and analyzes sources of hospital quality ratings.
The brief is accompanied by an index of quality data sources, which catalogs whether each source is free or for purchase, which providers and populations it evaluates, the measures it includes and the methodology it uses, along with the nature of the data.
