Achieving the Promise of Public Reporting: Finding the Best Maternity and Nursing Home Care

As consumers increasingly rely on information and reviews from a variety of sources to access all aspects of health care, its never been more important to have effective public reports at the ready, especially in a time when consumer-driven health plans are becoming standard for many employers offering health care to their employees. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and many state governments and regional coalitions produce a growing list of public reports on the quality of care by hospitals, physicians, nursing homes and other providers.

This HPOE and Health Services Research journal webinar explores the 'shoppable' nature of finding a nursing home and maternity care through the use of effective public reporting.

In June, HSR published a special issue on improving the science and practice of public reporting in research, partnering with issue sponsor the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The issue focuses on comprehensive findings from a 17-grant initiative designed to improve measurement and reporting in a wide variety of health care sectors.

During this webinar, participants learned about:

• The advancement of public reporting in health care research in recent years, especially with regards to transparency and accountability.
• How report producers can maximize their reports' usefulness and impact, and the ways government agencies plan to invest in public reporting improvement.
• The effect a star-based summary rating system, rather than detailed quality metrics, has had on nursing home use, and the benefits of coupling both strategies in public reporting.
• The factors that may influence use of public reports for hospital maternity care, and the great differences between what consumers want in a maternity care report versus what information is available to them.

Presenters:

• Moderator: Laurence Baker, Ph.D., professor of health research and policy, Stanford School of Medicine's Institute for Economic Policy Research
• Brent Sandmeyer, M.P.H., extramural research lead, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
• Rachel Werner, M.D., Ph.D., professor of general internal medicine, Penn Medicine; core investigator with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion
• Maureen Maurer, M.P.H., principal researcher, American Institutes for Research

To view the presentation slides only click here.

To view an archive of the presentation, click view item below.