Public Reporting and Transparency

One strategy for improving quality of care is to make information about the performance of hospitals, health plans, physicians, and other care providers widely available. The assumption is that individuals and organizations whose performance does not get high ratings will be motivated to improve performance in order to protect their professional reputations and their market share. RAND has conducted some of the seminal studies examining the potential link between public reporting of performance information and improvement in clinical quality of care and patient outcomes and enhanced patient experience. RAND has also played a major role in the development, testing, and implementation of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) family of surveys, developed under funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The CAHPS surveys are the most widely used patient experience surveys in the United States.