Department: Economics
Heidi Williams Advising Group
The sharing of information between experts (physicians) and non-experts (patients in the healthcare system): The assessment of healthcare provision by patients via surveys — generating “patient scores” — is a high-potential tool for monitoring the quality of healthcare provision and is increasingly in demand by patients and policy makers alike. In 2010, U.S. legislation mandated that Medicare link incentive payments to hospitals to quality measures, including measures of patient satisfaction. The National Health Service in the UK has also sought to integrate patient satisfaction metrics into the operation of the healthcare system. We are collaborating with a large healthcare system in the US that has pioneered private collection of patient scores, and publication of those scores online. Using a novel dataset combining medical records with survey responses that generated patient scores, we will investigate how the publication of patient scores influences provider practice, patient choice, and health outcomes, with the goal of providing detailed analysis of a novel information tool with practical lessons for healthcare policy.