Dive Brief:
- Patients of color, or those on public insurance, are still at increased risk for certain adverse events compared to White patients, regardless of high hospital safety ratings, according to a report out Wednesday from the Leapfrog Group.
- Although higher hospital safety ratings generally correspond with fewer adverse safety events, the report found that pattern doesn’t hold true for patients of color or those on Medicare or Medicaid, who were more likely to experience adverse events after surgery, including sepsis, blood clots and respiratory failure.
- Rather than suggesting problems with individual hospitals, the data points to a “systemic issue impacting the quality of care for Black and Hispanic patients and those with public insurance plans,” according to the report.
Dive Insight:
Conversations regarding racial disparities in medicine are not new. The 2020 summer of social reckoning renewed stakeholders’ interest in health equity and prompted academics, doctors, and the Biden administration to weigh in on how to solve underlying problems.
Researchers indicated one potential solution: Short of solving the disparities, they argued, hospitals should educate patients about their existence.
“From a policy perspective, our findings indicate … [patients] would benefit from better tools to help them assess the additional risk that may accompany a hospital stay,” the Leapfrog study authors wrote. “While publicly available hospital quality information is a good indication of the average quality of care a hospital delivers, this study illustrates that some patients systematically receive less safe care.”
Providing hospital safety grades by racial and ethnic subgroups, the authors argued, is a “clear solution.”
To do so, hospitals will need to have their incident data by subgroup, and there is policy momentum building toward that outcome. Though the CMS has emphasized equity in its clinical quality measure development and reporting programs since 2017, there has been renewed focus and energy on stratifying measure results in recent years to bring increased awareness and transparency to variations in patient care.
In 2021, the National Association of Accountable Care Organizations lobbied the CMS to incorporate health equity into patient surveys and stratify clinical quality measures by race. In the same year, the National Committee for Quality Assurance began stratifying its Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set along race and ethnic lines. In 2022, the CMS revamped its measures program, unveiling the National Quality Strategy Initiative — naming equity as one of four key tenets.
As Missy Danforth, vice president of healthcare ratings at The Leapfrog Group said in a press release, “Achieving safe care for all patients requires a focused commitment to transparency, better data collection, and targeted interventions.”
