by Kate Parker

Created on: August 01, 2008   Last Updated: August 07, 2008

Consumers can easily find useful data on gas grills, car seats, vacuums even hot dogs but in many states (24, to be precise) they are hard pressed to find any data about the quality of health care they can expect to receive from their physician or local hospital.

Given the growing momentum toward the consumer driven health care model, better reporting to consumers of health care safety data is inevitable and only fair, but just how useful could better reporting be? If reporting is improved in all 50 states, what should be done with the information that is reported, and will the consumer be expected (and able) to interpret the data to make wise health care decisions?

A growing consensus among health care providers is that public reporting is important because it allows communities to identify serious medical errors, analyze their cause and then work collaboratively to outline corrective or preventative action. By piggybacking the results of the reporting process, one community onto another, the potential exists to prevent the reiteration of known errors. Transparency in reporting individual physician and institutional performance data has the added benefit of increasing accountability, which leads to an increase in the overall quality of the health care provided.

But is internal transparency enough? Not when applied to the model of consumer driven health care. A consumer-based model requires an open, consumer-centered approach, informed by a reporting system that is standardized, fair (to providers and consumers), purposeful, accessible and designed with the goal of improving the safety and quality of health care. To achieve this approach, health care providers and communities need to come together and agree on what types of medical errors should be reported and how these errors should be reported.

For example, many states have adopted what is commonly referred to as "never events," or medical errors that should never happen. Should states that have not yet adopted reporting standards elect to report errors other than "never events," consumers (and health care providers seeking preventative information) are left to determine how best to compare apples and oranges how best to assign any meaning or significance to the reported data. Standardization of the reporting methods and processes, and of the information that is to be reported, could eliminate this unnecessary hurdle.

Yet even with this hurdle removed, the data must be accessible and understandable to be of greatest benefit to the health care consumer. Of the two, accessibility is probably the easiest to achieve and can be accomplished through effective marketing and communication campaigns. Ensuring that the reported data is understandable and truly beneficial to health care consumers is the more daunting task.

Suppose, for example, you are scheduled for surgery, and prior to the date of your surgery, you learn (through your health care provider's chosen reporting medium) that your physician recently performed surgery on the wrong body part of a prior patient. What do you do with this information? The answer will naturally depend on your perspective, your relationship with your physician, the degree of trust he or she holds for you, your trust in the information you have discovered, perhaps the urgency of the timing of the surgery, and a multitude of other factors unique to you.

The important point is that you, the health care consumer, are more fully informed and, thus, more fully empowered to make the best possible decisions about the health care you are about to receive.

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