Critique of transparency efforts

Dr. Ashish Jha posted an interesting critique of the Hospital Compare website run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). His criticisms are that there are too many measures, the measures aren't differentiated in importance, and the statistic methods don't differentiate among enough hospitals (only 0.5% of hospitals were rated as below average on one metric).

Having worked with this data before, I agree with the second two criticisms. The first criticism may be true, but would be addressed by a solution to the second criticism -- if consumers knew which metrics to pay attention to, the sheer volume of other metrics would be less overwhelming. The additional metrics might still be useful to those who want to get into details and need not always be presented. Ideally, those in the medical community could come out and identify which metrics are the most important to watch. For the metrics to be useful, they would indeed need to differentiate among more providers instead of lumping the vast majority of them into an "average" category.

Getting transparency correct in healthcare is hard. Fortunately, Dr. Jha points out some benefits to transparency, as demonstrated with regards to New York State's cardiac surgery reporting.