UPDATE: Edited cause I totally misread an indicator!
This time it’s obstetric quality metrics. “Association Between Hospital-Level Obstetric Quality Indicators and Maternal and Neonatal Morbidity“:
Importance In an effort to improve the quality of care, several obstetric-specific quality measures are now monitored and publicly reported. The extent to which these measures are associated with maternal and neonatal morbidity is not known.
Objective To examine whether 2 Joint Commission obstetric quality indicators are associated with maternal and neonatal morbidity.
Design, Setting, and Participants Population-based observational study using linked New York City discharge and birth certificate data sets from 2010. All delivery hospitalizations were identified and 2 perinatal quality measures were calculated (elective, nonmedically indicated deliveries at 37 or more weeks of gestation and before 39 weeks of gestation; cesarean delivery performed in low-risk mothers). Published algorithms were used to identify severe maternal morbidity (delivery associated with a life-threatening complication or performance of a lifesaving procedure) and morbidity in term newborns without anomalies (births associated with complications such as birth trauma, hypoxia, and prolonged length of stay). Mixed-effects logistic regression models were used to examine the association between maternal morbidity, neonatal morbidity, and hospital-level quality measures while risk-adjusting for patient sociodemographic and clinical characteristics.
Main Outcomes and Measures Individual- and hospital-level maternal and neonatal morbidity.
These researchers picked two perinatal quality measures. One was the percentage of deliveries that were elective before 39 weeks gestation. The other was c-sections for low-risk mothers. You want both to be low. Then they looked at both maternal and neonatal morbidity, and measured whether they were correlated with “quality”.
Here’s neonatal morbidity:
Quality is on the x-axis. Mortality is on the y-axis. Can you see a relationship? Cause I can’t. Neither could the statistics. The quality measures “were not associated with severe maternal complications (risk ratio [RR], 1.00 [95% CI, 0.98-1.02] and RR, 0.99 [95% CI, 0.96-1.01], respectively) or neonatal morbidity (RR, 0.99 [95% CI, 0.97-1.01] and RR, 1.01 [95% CI, 0.99-1.03], respectively).”
I don’t dislike the theory behind “pay for performance”. I just don’t think that the things we measure are often really “quality”. And the literature keeps making me feel like I’m right.
