Assessing information for consumers on the quality of medical care.

In recent years support for better public information on the quality of medical care has intensified, while the validity of the information available has been questioned. To address these concerns, we evaluated the reliability and validity of using each of 10 possible indicators to measure hospital and physician quality and the feasibility of providing the results to the public. We found that several of these indicators can provide useful, though not definitive, information on quality. In general, we advise consumers to combine information from more than one year and from more than one indicator to increase the likelihood that the relationship is accurate. For the provision of information on quality to achieve its potential, certain deficiencies in quality assessment must be addressed by both public and private policies. Strengthening the validity of quality assessments is vital to improve their credibility and to minimize negative effects on medical providers, individual consumers, and health care programs.