Healthcare transparency

The Disease Management Association of America has issued guidelines for measuring outcomes in disease management programs, a move aimed at helping employers determine whether such programs actually reduce the cost of caring for chronic conditions. The guidelines offer several study design tips, including use of a "pre-post" design incorporating concurrent comparison or control groups, as well as using medical and pharmacy claims cost data to calculate the financial impact of DM programs. …

Starting December 18, Massachusetts officials will begin publishing death rates for individual heart surgeons on a publicly accessible website. The site will offer mortality rate information on 55 surgeons who perform cardiac bypasses, one of the most common operations. In New York, where surgeon mortality data has been available since 1991, officials say the program has lowered death rates. Massachusetts surgeons, for their part, have expressed concern that public reporting will …

A Connecticut court has ruled that under Freedom of Information rules, the HMOs running the state's Medicaid program must disclose the rates that they pay cardiologists and gastroenterologists. They're also being required to disclose the number of times patients were denied prescriptions due to lack of prior approval, and whether those patients were given temporary supplies. The FOI case, which was originally brought by Yale professor Kari Hartwig and the New Haven Legal Assistance …

A leading activist group representing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) patients has announced plans to develop a tool rating the healthcare industry on how it treats GLBT patients. The group, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), is working with the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association on the effort, which attempts to establish whether hospitals are addressing the social, practical and medical needs of GLBT patients. The two have mailed out their survey, the Healthcare Equality …

HHS head Mike Leavitt is asking employers to commit to a set of four goals which aim to make cost and quality data more accessible to consumers. The goals include adopting health IT standards in order to make health information systems interoperable, increasing quality transparency, increasing pricing transparency, and offering rewards to encourage efficient, high-quality care. HHS has begun to develop specific quality and cost specs for employers to use in implementing the goals. The …

It's time for yet another consumer-driven healthcare effort to toot its horn. Starting in early 2007, Cincinnati residents will have access to quality data on 20 metro area hospitals, trade groups announced. The hospitals are participating voluntarily in the effort, which is backed by the Ohio Hospital Association and the Greater Cincinnati Health Council. The GCHC will provide the data through its website, which already offers reports comparing …

While Minnesota providers continue to improve their performance on a set of key quality measures, substantial gaps remain between the best and worst performing groups, according to a set of quality ratings just released by a community non-profit group. MN Community Measurement, which is backed by the Minnesota Medical Association and the state's health plans, issues quality ratings on the majority of health systems in the state. Among the positives the non-profit found was that health …

With the growth of transparency initiatives, health plans have a powerful incentive to publicize individual providers' prices. But most providers wouldn't want them to publish pricing data unexpectedly. If pricing data goes public without providers knowing, it could leave them unprepared for questions that patients might pose, or make them look bad by presenting figures out of context, notes an article on HealthLeadersMedia.com. Today, it's important to go over managed care …

The Wisconsin Hospital Association has launched a website promoting the quantifiable community benefits provided by its member hospitals. All of the state's hospitals participated in the effort. The site reports that in 2005, Wisconsin's 132 hospitals provided $900 million in free services, including $158 million worth of charity care (the state of Wisconsin defines "charity care" as care the hospital provides knowing in advance that it will not …

The new Massachusetts healthcare quality website takes a step in the right direction, but the data it uses is rather limited and not very up-to-date, making it far less useful than it could be, suggests Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in a recent post on his blog. First, he notes, …