Better than nothing
By Thomas Day
AHRQ (The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality ) recently issued a report about infections patients acquired while receiving healthcare treatment. The agency asserted that efforts to lower these infections had met with little success. True, the report used data through 2007, so it’s dated. And efforts since 2007 have surely been ramped up, given the success of checklists in their prevention and the focus of professionals on the problem.
Three societies – the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology – went further. In a statement, they criticized the reliance on administrative billing and coding data from the CMS,saying it “paints an inaccurate picture of healthcare-associated infections for the public.”
Not so fast!!! Assembling these data has been a giant step forward in providing a much higher level of transparency to the issue and ranking the performance of healthcare providers in their prevention. To criticize the use of billing and coding data is a bit like criticizing economic analysis built from income tax returns. Income tax returns are also prepared for a different purpose, are self-submitted under penalty of misrepresentation, and submitters are optimizing their own data within the limits of law. If billing data is being mis-submitted and overstates infections – well then I’d have to wonder why… and expect the now-harsh spotlight on the infections reported would certainly fix things for the better.
Surely, I’d feel more comfortable if these groups offered their own comprehensive assessment, didn’t cherry pick a few encouraging stats, and provided a method that could be replicated across the board. Absent that, it sure sounds like unproductive whining to me. Give me that CMS data any day. It’s better than nothing.
Thomas Day is president of HMC.
