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Performance data from private hospitals ‘ready for scrutiny’

July 2010 News

The public will have access to “bulletproof” data about the performance of private hospitals by the end of this year, according to one of the brains behind the much-anticipated Hellenic Project.

Outcomes including rates of mortality, MRSA and readmission will all be published at a sector-wide level this autumn, following months of data testing. Live data from the vast majority of private hospitals (including the five major groups Nuffield Health, General Healthcare Group, Spire Healthcare, HCA International and Ramsay Health Care) is now being fed into the Project.

A joint venture of Independent Healthcare Advisory Services (IHAS), the NHS Partners Network, Dr Foster and Healthcode, the Hellenic Project was launched in a bid to enable private hospitals to benchmark their performance against each other, and the NHS. In total, 93% of private beds will be represented in the data.

Graham Kendall, an adviser to NHS Partners Network who has worked closely on the project since its inception, is confident that the individual hospital groups involved will go public with their individual results.

“I am very optimistic that it will show all in a good light and so I would expect they will want to publish because it is very positive for them,” he told Health Insurance.

CALLS FOR TRANSPARENCY

Private medical insurers have consistently urged providers to help promote the sector by publishing the results of their care. Transparency is also seen as particularly important in the light of the Conservative party’s pledge to drive an “information revolution” in the NHS, facilitating patient choice by publishing data about individual NHS hospitals. Kendall believes that the robust methodology behind it will ensure that the data is immune to quibbling about its validity.

“One reason why we wanted to go to Dr Foster was that we recognised everything had to be case mix adjusted,” he said. “The data is absolutely bulletproof.”

Currently, it is difficult for the public to compare the performance of their local NHS provider to that of an independent hospital. A key barrier to including data from independent hospitals on the NHS Choices website is the fact that private hospitals have far lower volumes of activity.

All Hellenic Project indicators are based on NHS data definitions “as closely as possible”, according to Kendall. However, it will remain challenging to draw valid comparisons, according to Rosemary Hittinger, group director of governance and performance at HCA International.

“I suspect that that data will not show anything very interesting because it is derived electronically,” she said. “There is a point in making them derived in the same way as they are for the public sector but the public sector is very different so whether you can compare unplanned readmissions from very different providers I’m not absolutely sure.”

HCA International has been publishing benchmark data, including heart surgery survival rates, for some years. This is led by clinicians reporting on outcomes rather than based purely on electronic data.

Private hospital groups have, to date, focused on developing their own approaches to publishing performance indicators.

However, the government has moved to make the sector subject to the same regulatory regime as the NHS by requiring all independent healthcare providers to be registered with the Care Quality Commission, the regulator of health and social care in England, by this October. This means that private hospitals will have to meet 28 standards of quality and safety and that their performance against these standards will be published alongside that of NHS providers.