Health Data Now!

It's well known that medical spending is highly variable but so are medical outcomes.  Here is Begley and Interlandi in Newsweek:

After we interviewed dozens of oncologists, pored over published papers, and obtained outcomes data that cancer centers have never before made public, it became clear that for these cancers there are indeed significant outcome differences depending where you are treated.

Five years after surgery for prostate cancer, for instance, 72 percent of men treated at leading hospitals are alive, compared with 62 percent of those treated elsewhere. Scrutinizing data from specific cancer centers reveals even greater gaps. Five-year survival for stage IV prostate cancer is 71 percent at Fox Chase, for instance, but 38 percent nationally. For stage IV breast cancer, the respective figures are 28 percent and 19 percent–an almost 50 percent edge. For stage IV cervical cancer, five-year survival is 33 percent at the Cleveland Clinic vs. 16 percent nationally.

Some of this is probably due to differences in patient characteristics but it could go either way – the better hospitals often get the hardest to treat cases.

Many hospitals hide this data (or "fail" to collect it which amounts to much the same thing) but there are some good rules of thumb such as looking for hospitals that specialize in certain procedures and thus perform many of them (there are large economies of scale in quality).  Patients can also find information about which hospitals closely follow best practices (kudos to Medicare for this data and see here for a mashup with Google maps) although the measures used are probably the ones that are easiest to collect and not the ones that correlate best with mortality.

Nevertheless, providing information does seem to drive change if only from the shame that a hospital receives when it is found not to be following best practices.  It's true that report cards can cause problems when the drive to get a better score causes hospitals to be more reluctant to treat sicker patients but better data on patient characteristics (stage of cancer etc.) and better process/treatment information can alleviate this problem. In fact, all hospitals should be required to provide standardized information for all patients on patient characteristics, treatments and outcomes.  Only by making outcome information public will hospitals have the incentive and researchers have the ability to develop more accurate report cards.  In short, I cannot think of a simpler change that would improve health care to as great an extent as freeing the data.

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