Why Transparency?
The goal of transparency is to increase efficient healthcare delivery, reduce variation, improve quality, reduce costs, and improve patient and staff satisfaction.
SCOAP is collecting information about the care of surgical patients in order to monitor and improve the quality of care. We are pleased to report that SCOAP hospitals in Washington are getting safer and your care is improving in quality with each participating quarter. The data being made available here for the public demonstrates very good progress in improving care over time for several of the care measures.
Check out the latest Spine SCOAP report with 2015-2017 data.
Currently, the progress slides below show data that is a sum of all of the participating hospitals’ data rather than any one hospital’s specific data. Ongoing changes and improvements can be tracked, and we anticipate making data for current measures available in mid-2018.
Why go public?
In January 2009, SCOAP created a web forum for hospitals that wanted to voluntarily release their own SCOAP data to the public. At that time, 21 SCOAP hospitals began voluntarily releasing 12 months of aggregate data on 12 SCOAP process of care metrics.
In 2014, SCOAP hospitals again came together and chose to become transparent with a number of metrics across modules using data from 2013 discharges. Included in this transparency are Washington hospitals that are providing colon and rectal surgery, gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy, non-elective appendectomies, as well as cervical and lumbar spine surgery:
We encourage all SCOAP hospitals to release their data to the public using this forum. There is real value in “institutionalizing” the metrics through public disclosure and it seems that nothing drives improvement better than concern about being seen as an outlier. For some hospitals, this public release step happens after a period of growing comfortable with the process and verifying the fidelity of the data. We encourage all SCOAP hospitals to publicly release at least some data within 2 years of joining. The Washington Health Alliance, the largest grouping of healthcare stakeholders in Washington State, issued a press release in January 2009 congratulating SCOAP hospitals on progress towards keeping the public informed.
The decision to go public with data is entirely the individual hospital’s decision. Hospitals own their own SCOAP data and neither SCOAP nor the Foundation for Healthcare Quality is allowed to release data for purposes other than quality improvement. That requirement is regulated by state statute (Continual Quality Improvement Statute) and protects these data from discovery for other purposes.