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At psychiatric hospitals and other inpatient behavioral health facilities, good performance on routine quality measures does not necessarily lead to improvement in symptoms and other patient self-reported outcomes (SROs), reports a study in the November/December issue of the Journal for Healthcare Quality (JHQ), the peer-reviewed journal of the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ).
“[O]ur analyses suggest there is a gap in the data regarding the quality of patient experience and symptom improvement, with little supporting evidence that the current measures directly relate to such constructs,” according to the research by Rachel B. Nowlin, MS, and colleagues of Mental Health Outcomes, LLC (MHO), in Lewisville, Texas. They believe that quality assessment in behavioral inpatient care “has room for increased value return”—particularly by adding SROs or other direct measures of patient improvement.