What Is Quality Anyway? Performance Reports That Clearly Communicate to Consumers the Meaning of Quality of Care

TLDR

Existing research has focused on making quality measures understandable, but little has addressed making the overall concept of health‑care quality comprehensible to consumers. The authors assess how a framework for understanding quality affects consumers’ comprehension and salience of quality information. An experimental design tests the impact of providing a framework for describing quality of care and plain‑language descriptions of quality indicators. Providing a framework and plain‑language descriptions improves consumers’ understanding and perceived value of quality information, and the study discusses policy and practice implications.

Abstract

While there has been considerable work to identify ways to make the quality measures contained in comparative reports more understandable and digestible for consumers, there has been almost no research looking at ways to make the overall concept of health care quality more understandable and accessible to consumers. In this study, the authors determine the impact of providing a framework for understanding quality on the comprehension and salience of quality information. The study uses an experimental design and tests the effect of providing a framework for describing quality of care, as well as plain language descriptions of quality indicators. The findings indicate that when providing a framework and using plain language to describe quality indicators, consumers were better able to understand and to see greater value in the information, as compared to participants who saw a report that had neither of these attributes. The policy and practice implications are discussed.