A couple of studies out today from Health Affairs belabor the obvious.
First, the one less covered: Hospital Compare, the government website that for the last seven years has provided the public with detailed information about hospital performance, had no discernible impact on improving outcomes. It had no impact on how well the studied hospitals treated heart attacks and pneumonia, and only a modest improvement in outcomes for patients with heart failure. “The jury’s still out on Medicare’s effort to improve hospital quality of care by posting death rates and other metrics on a public website,” says lead author Andrew M. Ryan, an assistant professor of public health at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.
Comment: Since when has disclosure ever affected behavior? Has it stopped physicians from taking money from the drug industry? Has detailed nutrition labels ended the obesity epidemic? Look at how well it is working in campaign finance reform. We have more information than ever about how our elections are being bought and sold. Disclosure is the reform that avoids reform. The real issue for hospitals is how well they do in improving their performance on checklists of quality indicators, and whether that improves outcomes (the QUEST demonstration project at CMS suggests it does). Disclosure of poor performance may be a goad to action (or not, as this current study suggests). But it is not a substitute for action.
The second, more widely reported study showed that doctors with electronic access to patients’ prior imaging studies wound up ordering more imaging tests than doctors without access to such electronic records. Absent other incentives, why would anyone expect otherwise? Imaging is one of the great generators of “false positives” in the medical system. See something on a scan, better get a biopsy or do an angioplasty. Or at least another scan. Double the number of eyes seeing that scan and you double the number of false positives. The depressing fact is that under the current fee-for-service payment system, everyone gets paid that second time around.
Electronic records, which still don’t exist in many of the nation’s medical offices, are an extraordinarily important tool for tracking patients, avoiding errors, learning what works and what doesn’t, and eliminating duplication. But until it is linked to payment and delivery system reforms (bundled payments to integrated delivery systems) and greater incentives for physicians to deliver evidence-based care (better understanding of the risks and benefits of excessive imaging and reducing defensive medicine), it will have little impact on reducing overuse or lowering costs.
Merrill Goozner has been writing about economics and health care for many years. The former chief economics correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Merrill has written for a long list of publications including the New York Times, The American Prospect, The Washington Post and The Fiscal Times. You can read more pieces by him at GoozNews.
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