Dying to Know Public Release of Information about Quality of Health Care

摘要

The purpose of this monograph is to examine the theory behind this assumption of synergy, to identify evidence that supports or refutes the theory, and to suggest the practical and feasible implications of developing a system for public release of information about quality. The recent Institute of Medicine report on medical errors in the United States signals that improving quality of care will be a central political issue for most countries in the developed world in this century. Both the evidence and prior experience suggest that improving quality will be extraordinarily difficult. Thus, it is appropriate and timely that we examine carefully the role that public release of information might play in facilitating more rapid improvement in medical care systems. By examining the contribution of public disclosure of information in the United States, which has experimented most with this technique, we hope to increase our understanding of how quality improvement efforts can be successfully implemented in the UK, and to help quality of care improve more rapidly in the first three decades of the 21st century than it did in the last three decades of the 20th.