What Is Quality Anyway? Performance Reports That Clearly Communicate to Consumers the Meaning of Quality of Care

Abstract

While there has been considerable work to identify ways to make the quality measures contained in comparative reports more understandable and digestible for consumers, there has been almost no research looking at ways to make the overall concept of health care quality more understandable and accessible to consumers. In this study, the authors determine the impact of providing a framework for understanding quality on the comprehension and salience of quality information. The study uses an experimental design and tests the effect of providing a framework for describing quality of care, as well as plain language descriptions of quality indicators. The findings indicate that when providing a framework and using plain language to describe quality indicators, consumers were better able to understand and to see greater value in the information, as compared to participants who saw a report that had neither of these attributes. The policy and practice implications are discussed.

How Report Cards On Physicians, Physician Groups, And Hospitals Can Have Greater Impact On Consumer Choices

“…However, research suggests that although consumers report that they value quality information about their providers, consumer-directed reports on quality have been difficult to understand and use and have had minimal impact on consumer choices of providers. [4][5][6][7] Challenges associated with measuring performance at the individual physician level (for example, inadequate sample sizes and difficulty adjusting for severity of patients' medical conditions) 8 have resulted in group-level reporting and probably have limited the salience of report cards for consumers. Moreover, going forward, today's report cards will need to adapt to the fundamental changes in health care delivery on the horizon (such as accountable care organizations and efforts to assess provider quality based on episodes of care instead of individual procedures).…”

Context-based Strategies for Engaging Consumers with Public Reports about Health Care Providers

“…Because people are not very good at integrating information about several disparate attributes into an overall evaluation, quality reports should help with integration, for example, by providing "roll-up" scores that summarize across dimensions. And because consumers are often unfamiliar with the quality concepts underlying some measures, quality reports must explain the data they provide and educate consumers how to think about quality (Hibbard, Greene, & Daniel, 2010). However, as we noted above, for some subsets of consumers these two strategies may work at cross purposes, leading to more engaged, but less educated, decision makers.…”

The public gets what the public wants: Experiences of public reporting in long-term care in Europe

“…The ability of consumers to understand quality indicators is a challenge consistently identified in the literature on both LTC and health care [3,[38][39][40], not least because the assessment of quality in LTC is far from straightforward due to its multidimensional nature, reaching from quality of care to other outcome dimensions such as quality of life [16]. How users experience quality is determined by the individuals' own set of values, being inextricably linked to the role of the user as co-producer of care [41].…”