Hospital Report Cards: What's the EFFECT?

Measures of quality of care for acute MI and heart failure are reported to the public in the U.S. Although some assume that public reporting stimulates and achieves improvements in care, this assumption has not been rigorously tested. Now, investigators in Ontario, Canada, have performed a cluster-randomized trial of publicly reported measures of acute MI and heart failure care at 86 hospitals. Baseline performance data were collected for all the hospitals from April 1999 through March 2001. One randomly assigned group of hospitals received early feedback on their quality data, which was reported in January 2004 and strongly publicized in the local media. Quality-data feedback was delivered to the other group of hospitals in September 2005 …