Texas Health Resources, Arlington, Texas, has announced that it will begin making what it calls a “transparent, unbiased report of quality and safety performance at all of the health system's wholly-owned hospitals” to employers, physicians, patients and the public. While initially the information will non-interactive, static reports. As capabilities of the reporting platform are refined, the reports will evolve to include an interactive component that will provide additional information.
The "Quality and Safety Report to the Community: A Transparent Report Card from Texas Health Resources" is posted at www.TexasHealth.org/Quality-Reports. "We are stepping out ahead of every other health system in North Texas and ahead of most other systems across the nation," said Doug Hawthorne, CEO of Texas Health Resources, in a prepared statement. "We encourage other health systems to join us and embrace transparency in reporting quality and safety because it will raise the performance bar for all of us. It is the right thing to do for the people of the communities we are privileged to serve."
The system's Quality and Safety Report is based on a variety of indicators, mostly clinical data, and it includes the most currently available data. According to chief clinical officer and senior executive vice president Dan Varga, M.D., "Three basic rules govern what the report covers," Varga continued. "One—if Texas Health offers a medical procedure or treatment, we will try to find a third-party indicator that is appropriate to report. Two—all the indicators we use will be owned by some other organization, they will not be proprietary to Texas Health Resources. Three—we will include both the positive and negative metrics – we will not censor those we do not like. As a founding principle, we do not decide what to make public based on how it makes us look. We will give equal prominence to both favorable and non-favorable results."
The indicators used in the Quality and Safety Report have been developed by national specialty organizations based on the best current medical evidence, have gone through a rigorous consensus process, and have transparent and easily understandable indicator specifications.
