Nearly 100,000 people die annually from medical errors, according to the American Medical Association, and University Professor Judy Hibbard is determining whether public scrutiny will help hospitals improve that figure.
Hibbard, who teaches in the department of planning, public policy and management, is studying the impact of a hospital “report card” on the Madison, Wis., area, thanks to a $530,000 grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Over the next three years, she and fellow PPPM Professor Jean Stockard will study whether making the report card public will compel the hospitals to provide better care.
Hibbard’s study comes on the heels of the California Legislature’s recent approval of a study of fatalities from coronary procedures to determine if doctors were at fault.
“These types of public reports are coming all over the country,” Hibbard said. “It’s cardiac care in California and hospitals in Wisconsin right now, but soon most of the blanks will be filled in and these public reports will be the norm. This is at the very heart and soul of (health care) policy approaches taking place right now.”
The report card studied the performance of 121 Madison-area hospitals in five categories and compared the results with national averages, adjusted for the general health of the Madison population. The performances of 24 hospitals have been made public, while the rest will be kept private, and three years from now Hibbard will determine whether the hospitals whose information was made public made greater improvements in their care.
The report card was compiled by The Alliance, a nonprofit health cooperative in Madison. The Alliance originally intended the report to include only the 24 hospitals contracted with it.
The relatively inexpensive evaluation process allowed the health cooperative to include the other 97 hospitals, however, according to The Alliance administrator Cheryl Demars. The 24 hospitals contracted with The Alliance were the ones whose information was publicly released.
“This was mainly intended to help Alliance consumers make more informed decisions,” Demars said. “Although we decided it was important to study the impact of the report, it wasn’t intended as a survey of all Wisconsin hospitals.”
Demars said she anticipates that the hospitals whose information was disclosed will make greater improvements in their care.
“Our experience when dealing with public hospitals is that public pressure makes a difference,” she said. “The hospitals, for the most part, accept that the time for public scrutiny has come.”
Demars said when she was looking for someone to study public impact of reports, there was “not much literature available, but what little we found has been done by (Hibbard). She’s clearly the leading expert in the field.”
Hibbard has done several studies of health plans, but said they did not involve as much hard data as the Madison report. She said most health care providers improve after such a report is released publicly.