Benefits and Hazards of Reporting Medical Outcomes Publicly

As marketplace competition becomes the dominant force for change in the delivery of health care in the United States, its effects on the quality of health care are being sharply debated. There is increasing demand for more data on the quality of care to be made publicly available.1,2 For seven years, the New York State Department of Health has been collecting data to assess the quality of care provided to patients undergoing coronary-artery bypass grafting (CABG), and for five years it has made measures of quality publicly available. In this report we summarize the effects of this program and . . .