Can Public Reporting Cure Healthcare? The Role of Quality Transparency in Improving Patient–Provider Alignment

Abstract

In the past two decades, government and private organizations have ramped up efforts to measure and publicly report clinical outcomes, a practice known as “public reporting.” For example, in 2005 the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched the website Hospital Compare with share outcome data. Other sites, including CalHospitalCompare.org , the ProPublica Surgeon Scorecard, the Compare Hospitals site by the Leapfrog Group, and the hospital-rating websites of Healthgrades, Consumer Reports, Yelp, and U.S. News, have provided similar information. Despite making more and more information available, empirical evidence suggests that the reality of public reporting has fallen short of the promise. In “Can Public Reporting Cure Healthcare? The Role of Quality Transparency in Improving Patient-Provider Alignment” S. Saghafian and W. J. Hopp use a model of the impact of quality transparency via public reporting to generate insights into why previous efforts have been less than fully successful and to suggest ways in which future efforts can be more effective.