title: Interpretation of hospital-specific outcome measures based on routine data.
abstract: Hospital-specific outcome measures based on routine data are useful for stimulating interest in quality of care and for suggesting avenues for more in-depth analyses. They might also identify serious, once-in-a-lifetime failures of health care. However, such analyses are not definitive. They are a way of screening large amounts of routine data and, like all screening tools, they can generate false positives and false negatives. This is because differences in outcome measures across hospitals can be due to differences in types of patients seen (casemix), differences in data quality, and the play of chance; rather than differences in the quality of care. End-users of such analyses should be aware of these technical difficulties, otherwise skilled health workers in high-quality hospitals might be subjected to unwarranted criticism.
authors.affiliation: Health Information Centre, Queensland Health.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Coory
authors.forename: Danny
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Youlden
authors.forename: Philip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Baker
mesh_terms: D003625:Data Collection; D003953:Diagnosis-Related Groups; D017052:Hospital Mortality; D006761:Hospitals / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D007255:Information Services / Q000592:standards*; D007902:Length of Stay; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care / Q000379:methods*; D010359:Patient Readmission; D017064:Process Assessment, Health Care; D019984:Quality Indicators, Health Care; D011793:Queensland; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D017749:Total Quality Management