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Toward a Bright Future
William D. PetasnickPresident and CEO, Froedtert Hospital
“Transparency” is today’s hot topic in health care, as evidenced by a flurry of information in USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and local media. But it means different things to different people. For me, transparency provides the public with meaningful information on price and quality of health services, so people know what to expect. Its benefits are informed consumers and ultimately, significant advances in quality. Transparency may also transform delivery of services, because providers can benchmark performance against peers, allowing private insurers in public programs to reward quality and efficiency.
As a founding member of the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality, we support the Wisconsin Hospital Association’s (WHA) Web site for information on hospital services and charges (wipricepoint.org). And we strongly advocate the transparency agenda.
What we measure can lead to significant enhancements. However, we must be careful not to view healthcare markets as we do others; they won’t perform exactly as do markets for other goods and services, where the products are always just the same and, as Karen Davis, PhD, president of The Commonwealth Fund points out, “only price matters.”
Still, through hard work and participation in multiple national improvement efforts, we are improving our own public reporting of quality information. Froedtert has made significant strides using proven guidelines. For instance, specific medications given within a defined time period to heart attack and heart failure patients have resulted in better outcomes.
In today’s competitive environment, hospitals are moving toward public reporting for a number of reasons. Employers are offering more consumer-driven health insurance plans, designed to make employees more price-sensitive. People who pay high premiums or have limited means want to track out-of-pocket costs to better manage health care. And, hospitals can learn best practices from each other.
Recently, an American Hospital Association policy statement called for sharing meaningful information about the price of hospital care. Among the objectives are presenting information that is easy for people to understand and use; explaining how and why prices vary and encouraging price as one of several considerations in healthcare decisions.
Although Wisconsin is a national leader in transparency efforts, we clearly have much to do. However, our work will go a long way toward encouraging patients to participate in wise healthcare decisions. And credible, timely information forms the basis of an efficient healthcare market. At Froedtert, we are committed to this effort. In the months ahead, we’ll take steps to make price and quality data more readily available on our Web site. (For more information now, visit wipricepoint.org and wicheckpoint.org.)
Source: Froedtert Today Date: June 2006 |
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