Raising the Bar for Healthcare Providers

Having Provider Ranking System (PRS) integrated into a Self-Insured Employer’s Benefit Package, or an Insurer’s or Third-Party Administrator’s Network to identify those most experienced, by service performed, is just the first step of Denniston Data’s mission and core purpose: to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the U.S. healthcare system. On a higher level, the very existence of an objective, transparent and annually updated ranking tool like PRS, serves a greater good. It raises the bar for all healthcare providers – knowing they are being ranked among their peers – to focus on what they do best, fine tuning their skills to do even better, do it more often, and reach optimum proficiency. A ranking system is a means for setting standards. It is a fair way for all providers to see how they compare to their peers in terms of how often they perform each test or procedure; a yardstick, if you will, that helps them measure themselves against the pool of others who practice within their area of specialty.  After all, measuring tools of some form are necessary and utilized in every aspect of our lives: clocks, odometers, thermometers, scales, rulers, compasses, money; they are, in fact, essential to everything we do in science, industry and commerce. Clearly, in healthcare, there are any number of measuring or diagnostic tools to determine how a patient compares to “normal” – stethoscopes, blood tests, stress tests, EKG’s, to name a few. A patient can learn relatively quickly if they have deviated from the norm. Not so easy for a provider. Once a provider is out of school where he or she is tested and rated and ranked on performance, there is little available to help assist him to gage his experience level and expertise against others. According to the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM), “Public reporting may affect quality through transparency, consumer choice, and reputation. Making quality performance results publicly available provides transparent information about variations in performance. Transparency enables consumers or their agents to use quality reports to choose health plans, hospitals, and doctors. Transparency and consumer choice also increase the motivation of clinicians, hospitals, and systems to improve performance because of concerns about reputation.” (McGlynn, 2020)  ^“Quality measurement is fundamental to systematic improvement of the healthcare system. Whilst the United States has made significant investments in healthcare quality measurement and improvement, progress has been somewhat limited…Numerous issues have limited improvement, including lack of alignment in the use of measures and improvement strategies, the fragmentation of the US healthcare system, and the lack of national electronic systems for measurement, reporting, benchmarking and improvement.” (Burstin, 2016)