On Oct. 1, St. Elizabeth Physicians (SEP) began offering customers a new tool to better manage their healthcare decisions.
The practice, which is made up of more than 400 providers in 32 specialties, will launch a new webpage that lets patients view how well the group performs on a variety of measures compared to national benchmarks. Visitors to www.stedocs.com/ratings can also see how providers scored on patient satisfaction surveys.
More and more practices and hospitals are publicly reporting such measures as part of increasing trend toward transparency in healthcare.
“St. Elizabeth Physicians believes it is important to be transparent with our patients regarding the outcomes they can expect if they are a patient,” said Dr. Glenn Loomis, president and CEO of St. Elizabeth Physicians. “Since this is only a small subset of all the quality measures we follow, consumers should use it as an example of how SEP is doing compared to national best practices. They can see that SEP has improved substantially on all the measures over the past three years and SEP is now above national best practice on many measures.”
Some hospitals and other healthcare entities are required to report how well they compare on certain quality measures by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees Medicare and related programs. Physician practices like St. Elizabeth Physicians aren’t yet required to provide the information.
But the measures, which look at measures such as how well groups are helping patients with diabetes manage their cholesterol levels, help patients know if they’ve chosen the right practice for their needs, said Judy Hirsh, director of consumer engagement and programs with the Health Collaborative of Greater Cincinnati.
The information also gives patients a better understanding of what they need to do to manage their care and what questions to ask their providers, Hirsh said.
“If you’re new in town and you’re shopping for a new doctor or practice, here’s a great way to get information other than asking a friend or co-worker,” she said. “And it’s really important, with something like diabetes, to help give both the patients and the physician the same language in terms of how they talk about goals for diabetes. For a patient to be informed about diabetes, there are these five goals. These are things I should work toward. So they they’re more educated when they go in and talk to their physician about what their goals should be.”
