PA Consortium Launches Quality Website
The Pennsylvania Health Care Quality Alliance (PHCQA) represents a group of the Pennsylvania Medical Society, hospitals across the State, the four Blue health payers in Pennsylvania, and federal and state policymakers. The organization just updated their website to include quality-specific information (pdf).
Information included on the site is gathered from acute care hospitals across the state, which covers 170 different facilities. Included are smaller, rural hospitals to tertiary care and teaching hospitals in the bigger cities across Pennsylvania. One of the goals driving website development by PHCQA is to provide patients with a single, user-friendly resource containing hospital quality information which can be easily searched and assessed.
The PHCQA notes that the effort required the development of a new set of quality measures. Prior to the initiative, hospitals generally utilized a varied set of quality measures. In order to be able to effectively present data for the entire State, a standard set of measures was required.
The quality measures developed by the PHCQA include standards of care for treatment developed by national organizations such as the Joint Commission, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Standards cited by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council were also considered.
The first three diseases considered on the site include heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, and healthcare associated infections. Of those, the first three account for between 60 and 70 percent of all admissions to acute care facilities. The four conditions together represent some of the most expensive diseases treated in the acute care setting. Additional disease states will be added as the site grows.
The PHCQA notes the opportunities for consumers associated with the development of websites that include quality information. Availability of such involves healthcare consumers in the process of determining how healthcare money is spent. It also provides more information for payers.
More sites containing quality information for comparison, sponsored by a variety of different agencies, have been coming online over the past three years. The efforts have recently accelerated because of interest from health payers working to gain control over costs.
March 25, 2008 Related topics: Partnerships & Consortia, Quality, Safety, Errors