This is cross-posted from e-patients.net.
The PDF at right is a summary of sample data from this new dataset.
The Leapfrog Group is a highly respected patient safety organization. They’ve earned a reputation for carefully and thoughtfully assessing providers’ actual performance in quality and safety. Their mission statement:
To trigger giant leaps forward in the safety, quality and affordability of health care by:
- Supporting informed healthcare decisions by those who use and pay for health care; and,
- Promoting high-value health care through incentives and rewards.
Today, Leapfrog’s affiliated organization Hospital Safety Scores announced a major update of its A-through-F grades of thousands of US hospitals, and new smartphone apps to access the data on the fly.
Predictably, the hospitals who got an F – based on their own data! – are saying it’s “not a fair scoring system.” Happily, Leapfrog follows the best practices of open science: they fully disclose all their data, the methodology they used, and who designed the system. This means all buyers of care – e-patients, families, employers – can examine the data and assess claims of fairness for ourselves.
The full press release is here. I won’t take time to go into it; many others are doing so – here’s a current Google News search and blog search. Here, I want to focus on two aspects that are core to participatory medicine: understanding the data, and why this matters.
