Hospital performance, from the patient's perspective

This work is needed, said Ethan Basch, MD, MSc, director of the Cancer Outcomes Research Program at UNC Lineberger, because patient-reported feedback about symptoms and functioning is rarely used to measure quality of care. Performance is typically measured based on hospital readmission rates, infections, procedural complications, or survival, Basch and his collaborators reported in a new article in the journal Value in Health.

"It's important to understand how patients feel in the assessment of quality of medical care, and there are established methods for gathering that information," said Basch, who is an associate professor in the UNC School of Medicine, and the paper's lead author.

Basch led a panel of experts from the American Medical Association's Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement to develop the playbook of best practices for implementing patient-centered assessments of health care quality.

The group reviewed practices already implemented as well as existing studies on the subject to come up with nine recommendations for developing, using and interpreting the results of patient questionnaires on quality.

Basch said a key recommendation that came out of the group's work is that it's important to measure performance based on what's important to patients. The only way to determine what is important to patients is to systematically ask the patients themselves.

The hope is that their work will encourage more integration of patient-reported outcomes into performance assessment efforts.

"There are now established methods for developing these measures, and the challenge ahead is to implement these methods," Basch said.