This proposal addresses the need for objective hospital quality ranking tools that are relevant to patients'experiences and customizable to their individual conditions. This need is created by market changes where patients are increasingly being made aware of differences in quality between providers who will improve their odds at success. Medicare, state governments, insurers and several private companies offer information on hospital quality and cost across many conditions and incorporating a variety of data, process and outcomes quality indicators. However, according to investors, bankers, industry analysts and entrepreneurs, comparison tools are still at an embryonic stage. They suffer from limited specificity, low resolution, conflicts of interest and misfit in the patient information finding process. This leads to patient confusion and perceptions that information is meaningless for decision making. PickCare (tm) is a hospital comparison tool that will address gaps that exist in current hospital ranking systems using advanced statistical and econometric models that have never been applied in this space. In phase 1 we developed Pickcare v2.0 in kidney transplantation and showed that: 1) these models improve specificity through customization to patient factors that our analysis unearths are most important;2) our models improve resolution by using an expanded history of risk factors;3) the user interface tested with patients/ family communicates the system's improved resolution as differences across hospitals that patients can understand, and its specificity as a message of hope and alternatives. In phase 2 we will expand to Pickcare v3.0 to 1) accommodate user feedback from phase 1, 2) scale to accommodate more treatments beginning with dialysis and 3) further imbed the system in patients'information finding process. The deliverable of Phase 2 will be version 3 of Pickcare to be released on-line for kidney transplantation and tested internally with recruited patients for dialysis. A manuscript describing how the system influences patient choice in kidney transplantation based on analysis of on-line user data will also be submitted for publication.
This proposal addresses the need for user-friendly web-based tools to help patients and their families choose between hospitals based on the quality of care they will receive. The tool is unique in that it is customized to patient conditions, it has high resolution to separate excellent, average and poor hospitals, it addresses patients'motivations to search for hospital information and builds trust by answering their questions independently of insurers or hospitals.
| Petrou, Constantia (2012) Public reporting of transplant center outcomes: an incentive for improved patient care? Expert Rev Pharmacoecon Outcomes Res 12:391-3 |
