Medical care
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Surgical mortality varies widely across hospitals, but the degree of temporal variation within individual hospitals remains unexplored and may reflect unsafe care. ⋯ Dynamic monitoring of outcomes within every hospital may detect safety issues earlier than traditional benchmarking and guide efforts to improve the value of surgical care nationwide.
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Hospital-specific and surgeon-specific public reporting of performance measures is expanding largely due to calls for transparency from the public and oversight agencies. Surgeons continue to voice concerns regarding public reporting. Surgeons' perceptions of hospital-level and individual-level public reporting have not been assessed. This study (1) evaluated surgeons' perceptions of public reporting of surgical quality; and (2) identified specific barriers to surgeons' acceptance of public reporting. ⋯ Surgeons expressed concerns about public reporting of quality metrics, particularly reporting of individual surgeon performance. These concerns must be addressed to gain surgeons' acceptance and to use public reporting to improve health care quality.