• E-mail
• Print
• RSS

Report: QIOs may not help drive quality improvements

Quality Improvement Monitor, June 16, 2005

Hospitals that participate with quality improvement organizations (QIOs) are not more likely to score better on performance standards than hospitals that don't participate, according to a study in the June 15 Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers analyzed medical records of more than 43,000 Medicare patients from four QIOs serving Maryland, New York, Nevada, Utah, Washington, and Washington, DC, between 1999 and 2001. They measured improvements in five clinical areas-irregular heartbeat, heart attack, heart failure, stroke, and pneumonia-using 15 quality indicators the QIOs target in their work.

At the start of the study, hospitals working with QIOs performed better than the others on five of 15 indicators. But during the next three years, there was no significant difference in the performance of hospitals in the quality program or out of it for 14 of the 15 standards.

Hospitals that did participate with QIOs did a better job vaccinating elderly patients against pneumonia, however.

The lone exception was that participating hospitals did a better job vaccinating the elderly against bacteria that causes pneumonia.

The American Health Quality Association-the trade group that represents QIOs-criticized the report.

"The study does not reflect the improvements made to the program since 2002, and the public should not take this as an accurate assessment of QIOs' value today," David Schulke, executive vice president of the association, said in reaction to the report.

Preliminary data from 2002-2005 show that hospitals working wtih QIOs achieved greater improvement in nine of 10 quality measures than hospitals receiving little or no assistance from QIOs, Schulke said. 

• E-mail to a Colleague
• Print
• RSS
• Archive