Are there negative consequences of public reporting? The hype and the reality

Hospital Performance Assessment in Congenital Heart Surgery: Where Do We Go From Here?

“…Recent questions raised regarding the current statistical methods used for public reporting of congenital heart surgery outcomes data, changes in the methodology used by U.S. News & World Report resulting in wide swings in program ranking from year to year, and reports in the national media questioning the outcomes and level of transparency at certain programs have highlighted the many challenges around reporting and understanding publicly reported data in the field. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] Many aspects related to performance assessment in the congenital heart disease (CHD) population are common across other medical and surgical subspecialties, while other factors unique to CHD bring additional challenges to consider. We describe the current state of hospital performance assessment as it relates to congenital heart surgery and focus on the use of adjusted mortality rates, the most common metric used in this field and others.…”