The Role of the Private Sector in Monitoring Health Care Quality and Patient Safety

Article-at-a-Glance Background As payers, purchasers, and providers, both the public and private sectors have a stake in developing sound methods of measuring health care quality and patient safety. However, the role of the private sector in a national quality monitoring system remains largely underdeveloped. Private sector role in health care quality monitoring There have been some attempts to pool private-sector data through health care industry efforts to measure and monitor the quality of health care services. Yet despite a number of public/private partnerships, no standard method exists for measuring and monitoring health care quality and safety across public and private payers. The AHRQ workshop on private-sector quality monitoring The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) sponsored a workshop in fall 2000 to address the private sector's role in monitoring quality in the health care system. National experts developed a conceptual framework and recommendations on the design and scope of a private-sector data monitoring system. Ten key attributes of the monitoring system, such as timeliness of reports, flexibility, efficiency, and linkability, were identified. Barriers and gaps to the development of such a system include the cost of data collection, the diversity of the units of data collection, data privacy, and limitations of administrative data elements. Summary A comprehensive, public/private data collection system would address the multidimensional nature of quality and use data to effectively represent this complexity to the extent possible.