https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hospital-outcomes-neglected-consumer-metric-peter-a-wadsworth

Conclusions

While Hospital Outcomes Scores may seem somewhat simplistic to clinicians, the methodology was based on two fundamental principles of consumerism:

1.    Hospital outcomes should be maximally transparent to consumers.

2.    Hospital outcomes should be presented in a manner that is easy to understand and facilitates area-wide comparisons of all hospitals.

Some data providers make similar information available, but in a format that makes it difficult for the consumer to find the hospital(s) in his or her area the best outcomes. Limiting the number of hospitals that can be compared, whatever good was intended, induces consumer fatigue resulting in sub-optimal results.

But Hospital Outcomes Scores are only as good as the CMS outcomes data on which they are based. That data is by definition backward looking and is somewhat dated by the time CMS makes it public.

The author has great respect for the work of organizations that rate hospital safety. Some of them have developed extensive data gathering efforts and rating methodologies that enable them to issue semi-annual updates on a more timely basis than CMS. The information they gather and their attention to trends enable them, in theory, to predict future outcomes performance. The findings of University of Michigan researchers cited in this article, however, suggest that they have not yet hit the mark.

Rather than using Hospital Outcomes Scores in isolation as a substitute for other safety and quality ratings, the author proposes a more holistic approach wherein HOS and other safety ratings are viewed together. And HOS might best be used as a first screen to identify hospitals with the lowest Death Scores in the service area followed by a more detailed examination.

The author believes that Hospital Outcomes Scores represent yet another step toward more useful consumer information. CMS will continue to release updates, and the in-depth work of Barry L. Rosenberg et. al. suggests that over time better data can be analyzed in more sophisticated ways to compare hospital outcomes performance.  But without a broad consumer education initiative that emphasizes outcomes, more sophisticated data analysis will be useful only to healthcare professionals.