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Agency Won't Sell Hospital Care Reports; Hospitals Protest Program With Insurers

Posted on: Monday, 5 December 2005, 09:01 CST

By Sue Reinert; SUE REINERT

The Patriot Ledger

Hospital objections have squelched a plan by the major U.S. health care accrediting agency to sell reports on the quality of hospital care to insurers, including Blue Cross companies in Massachusetts and 35 other states.

The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations will end the program in February after providing one year of quarterly reports, officials said this week.

The commission, known as JCAHO, won't undertake any other projects to sell the reports, which are based on data it collects from hospitals as part of the accrediting process, spokeswoman Charlotte Hill said.

"There were issues raised by the hospitals, and our board, in light of that, will no longer pursue it," Hill said.

Insurers that are part of the Blue Cross system expect to find another source for the analyses, a spokesman for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association said.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts "reviewed the analysis (from JCAHO) but we did not use the results," spokeswoman Susan Leahy said. The Boston-based insurer has information on patient care quality at hospitals "from our own database," Leahy said.

The commission alarmed the American Hospital Association when it began selling hospital quality reports in May to the central organization for state and regional Blue Cross insurers.

The reports came from publicly available information collected by JCAHO and two federal government agencies, which measure hospital performances in areas such as heart attack care, influenza vaccinations for pneumonia patients and childbirth.

The commission had been aggregating the reports into a single analysis to sell to insurers, and the Blue Cross Association sent the reports to 19 Blue Cross insurers in 36 states, said association spokesman Chris Hamrick.

The insurers intended to show the reports to employers and to individual hospitals in their networks in order to improve care. Blue Cross said it might use the information as a standard to reward hospitals for high quality.

The American Hospital Association launched a campaign against the initiative, saying it might create a conflict of interest to have an accrediting body sell information from the hospitals it evaluated to health insurers.

Hospitals also objected to a JCAHO plan to collect individual patient records, without names, to make sure the performance statistics they receive from hospitals are accurate. Selling that information might violate a federal health privacy law, the American Hospital Association said.

In backing down from the program, JCAHO said it will continue efforts to collect patient-level information, but will not sell the data.

"We will be pursuing other options for the use of patient-level data to improve the quality and safety of care," spokeswoman Hill said.

Sue Reinert may be reached at sreinert@ledger.com.

Source: Patriot Ledger, The; Quincy, Mass.

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