Least Surprising Study Results

Today in non-shocking results:

Medicare’s seven-year public reporting initiative for hospitals, Hospital Compare, had no impact on reducing death rates for two key health conditions and just a modest effect on a third. That’s the conclusion of a just-released study that raises questions about the initiative’s ability to improve the quality of care provided by the nation’s hospitals.

I’m kind of surprised this would be found surprising. Hospital Compare is a dreadful website, as I’ve explained before. It’s hard to navigate, gives you no indication of what information is relevant and important, and makes it difficult to, you know, compare hospitals. On the scale of government-run statistics websites, FRED is a 10 and Hospital Compare is maybe a 1.5. If the idea was that patients would select high-quality hospitals and thereby bring down the error rate, it’s typically a good idea to make it easy to compare and thus select hospitals.

If information is hard to use, you shouldn’t be surprised to see it unused. Since patients find it difficult to select on the basis of quality, and insurers are only taking tentative steps on selecting on that basis, hospitals have little incentive to improve.