Last week, Medicare added patient satisfaction data to its hospital reporting website. This is progress, but it raises an interesting question: should patient satisfaction scores be case-mix adjusted?The motivation to include patient satisfaction data comes from the Institute of Medicine’s inclusion of “patient-centeredness” as one key component ...

In this month’s issue of the Joint Commission Journal of Quality and Patient Safety, I (with UCSF’s Adams Dudley and the American Hospital Association's Nancy Foster) tackle this provocative question. The answer may surprise you: yes (probably). The devil will be in the details.I hope you’ll have a chance to read the full article (the Joint ...

Stuff this week that caught my eye: Does medical tourism harm the natives? Are all those CT scans destroying more than our budgets? Are nocturnalists at risk for more than decubs? Will Medicare need to cut hospital payments to fuel P4P? Answers: yes, yes, probably, and duh.Yesterday, NPR’s All Things Considered described the dark side of medical ...

At my just-completed annual hospital medicine CME course, we held a fascinating session on the future of quality measurement, transparency, and pay for performance (P4P). The discussants – Andy Auerbach, Peter Lindenauer, and Kaveh Shojania – all emphasized the limits of process measurement, particularly noting the problems of unforeseen ...