Taking the pulse : Hospital performance indicators from the patient's perspective

The purpose of this paper is to familiarize the reader with some of the indicators that are often used to compare providers and to draw attention to areas where improvements are necessary in the way that the indicators are being applied and used. [...] Depending on the degree of heterogeneity and the adjustments that are made for it, indicators can be quite misleading in their assessment of the quality of care. [...] Likely the biggest hurdle that indicators are faced with is separating the extent to which health outcomes are the result of factors not related to the quality of care that the hospital provided from true quality differences. [...] The difference between the performance level and the actual number of day procedure cases for a given CPA combination represents the cases to be shifted in order to achieve the CPA performance level. [...] The performance level is set by the hospital that has the highest percent of day procedures for the given combination (given that the day procedure “qualifies”).