Clinical Excellence

Mar 8 2007

CHARTing Quality

Kaiser Permanente participates in CalHospitalCompare

Oakland, Calif. — All 30 of Kaiser Permanente's hospitals in Northern and Southern California participated in a new, state-wide report card for hospitals that went online this week. For the first time, this allows consumers to evaluate hospital care in one central location.

Kaiser Permanente is a leader and founding member of the group of hospitals, consumers, health care providers, purchasers, and insurance plans – known as CHART–that produced the new site, CalHospitalCompare.org.

Kaiser Permanente officials are hopeful that, eventually, all of the qualifying California hospitals will make their performance scores available to the public. The idea is to arm consumers with valuable information as they are making important decisions on their care.

Kaiser Permanente strongly supports public reporting of quality and patient satisfaction as an important way to help consumers make informed choices about health care, and to improve the quality of care for everyone. In fact, as a leader in reporting quality measures, Kaiser Permanente has been reporting a broad array of quality performance measures on its own web site, kp.org, since January.

Quality reports available on kp.org include:

• Health Plan Accreditation Status From
  the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA)
• Clinical Effectiveness of Care Measures of Performance
  From the Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS®)
• Health Plan Member Satisfaction
  From the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) Survey
• Hospital Accreditation Status and Core Performance Measures
  From the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO)
• Hospital Patient Safety
  From The Leapfrog Group for Patient Safety Survey

"The availability of these reports on kp.org supports Kaiser Permanente's goal to deliver high-quality health care across the organization, while also supporting our members and other consumers in making informed decisions about their health care," said Michael Mustille, MD, associate executive director for the Permanente Federation.

Kaiser Permanente officials believe that CalHospitalCompare is a good first start at creating a single report card for hospitals. However, there is more work to be done in refining the methodology and rating systems used, and Kaiser Permanente is committed to being part of this process. In some cases, such as pneumonia care and prevention, the measures used to rate hospitals are relatively new. This is also the first time patient experience ratings are being collected and reported publicly. It is important to have this kind of baseline data to shine a light on the areas where health care can make improvements.

In addition, some data published by CalHospitalCompare is based on information that is as much as 18 months old. Because Kaiser Permanente captures its performance data in more timely ways and uses it to make frequent adjustments and changes, many Kaiser Permanente hospitals have already improved their performance since CalHospitalCompare gathered data for reports. These improvements will be evident in future updates of the CalHospitalCompare Web site.

CalHospitalCompare reports on one aspect of Kaiser Permanente's integrated health care delivery system, which in addition to hospital care, also includes preventive, routine, and specialized care. To get the full picture of Kaiser Permanente quality, it is important to review and balance both inpatient and outpatient measures.

Kaiser Permanente has a long track record of earning excellent ratings from highly respected, independent third parties. Kaiser Permanente's outpatient quality scores–from NCQA, CCHRI, OPA, and others–have consistently improved in recent years, to the point that we received the highest overall ratings for clinical quality among all of the commercial HMO's in California. Even when Kaiser Permanente ranks at the top of industry, however, the organization is continually improving its outcomes in a broad range of areas–from treatment of hypertension and asthma to breast cancer screening–reaching the top 10 percent of all health care providers nationally.