Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/824946
63 QUALITY IMPROVEMENT & MEASUREMENT VA Makes Quality & Patient Satisfaction Scores, Wait Times Transparent By Heather Punke T he Department of Veterans Affairs launched its Access and Qual- ity Tool in April that allows veterans to see patient wait time and care quality data online. The tool allows veterans to see how quickly their local VA can see them, as well as facility-specific patient satisfaction scores and how their VA facility's care quality stacks up to other local, non-VA hospitals. "Veterans must have access to information that is clear and understand- able to make informed decisions about their healthcare," said Secre- tary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin, MD. "This allows veterans to see how VA is performing." The VA hopes this tool will "instill a spirit of competition and encourage [our] medical facilities to proactively address access and quality issues" and also empower veterans to choose the best care option for them, ac- cording to Poonam Alaigh, MD, the VA's acting under secretary for health. Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group, called the VA's new tool "bold" in an emailed statement, and invited VA hospitals to participate in the annual Leapfrog Hospital Survey to "further their bold commitment to transparency." The statement from Ms. Binder continues, "Our nation's veterans, and all U.S. citizens, deserve nothing less than full transparency from the facilities that they rely on for care." n VA Hospitals Outperform Non-VA Hospitals on Patient Outcome Measures By Heather Punke T hough the Veterans Affairs health system has been under fire for various reasons, a look at quality data shows VA hospitals actually out- perform non-VA hospitals in outcomes, readmission and mortality measures, according to a research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine. However, the data suggest VA hospitals need to work on patient experience and behavioral health. Researchers examined hospital-level quality and patient experience data on 129 VA hospitals and 4,010 non-VA hospitals on CMS' Hospital Compare website. ey found VA hospitals had better outcomes than non-VA hospitals for six of the nine patient safety indicators and found no significant difference on the three other indicators. VA hospitals also had better mortality and readmission rates than their non-VA counterparts. When it came to patient experience measures, how- ever, non-VA hospitals outperformed VA hospitals on nursing and physician communication, responsive- ness, quietness, pain management and if the patient would recommend the hospital. Non-VA hospitals also outperformed VA hospitals on most of the behavioral health metrics examined by the researchers. e research letter authors speculate VA hospitals outperform non-VA hospitals on outcome measures because the VA invested time and effort into quali- ty improvement and care coordination in the last 30 years and the system has a leg-up on care coordination because patients usually receive all of their care within the one system. "While concerns remain about the validity of some of the measures used in current public reporting of health quality, the available data suggests that VA hos- pitals have a similar or more favorable quality com- pared with non-VA hospitals," the authors conclude. "On the other hand, these results suggest that VA hos- pitals should focus on improving certain aspects of pa- tient experience and behavioral health." e VA recently launched a tool that allows veterans to compare patient wait time and quality data of VA hospi- tals with non-VA hospitals in the area in an attempt to be more transparent with its patients and empower vet- erans to choose the best care option for themselves. n Do Higher Yelp Scores Mean Higher- Quality Care? By Heather Punke Y elp reviews may actually help steer patients to high- er-quality hospitals, ac- cording to a new research paper from the Manhattan Institute. Authors Paul Howard, PhD, a se- nior fellow and director of health policy at Manhattan Institute, and Yevgeniy Feyman, adjunct fellow at the institute, compared "trust- ed" Yelp ratings of acute care hospitals in New York with ob- jective, risk-adjusted measures of hospital quality, using data pulled from various sources. The analysis uncovered a cor- relation between a hospital's Yelp rating and its rate of poten- tially preventable readmissions — meaning hospitals with higher Yelp star ratings had lower read- mission rates. "The results of our analysis sug- gest that Yelp ratings are useful and reliable, on their own, for comparing the quality, as mea- sured by risk-adjusted, poten- tially preventable readmissions, of different hospitals," according to the paper. "Yelp scores are, in fact, good composite measures of hospital quality." However, Dr. Howard and Mr. Feyman make it clear patients shouldn't rely on Yelp alone when choosing a provider organiza- tion. "[W]hen people can choose where they will obtain care — as do patients with traditional Medi- care coverage for elective or planned surgeries, or when con- sumers can choose among insur- ance options — Yelp ratings can provide a helpful guide," they wrote. n