Public reporting and the quality of care of German nursing homes

authored by: Annika Herr, Thu Van Nguyen, Hendrik Schmitz
Abstract: Objectives Since 2009, German nursing homes have been evaluated regularly by an external institution with quality report cards published online. We follow recent debates and argue that most of the information in the report cards does not reliably measure quality of care. However, a subset of up to seven measures does. Do these measures that reflect “risk factors” improve over time? Method Using a sample of more than 3000 German nursing homes with information on two waves, we assume that the introduction of public reporting is an exogenous institutional change and apply before–after-estimations to obtain estimates for the relation between public reporting and quality. Results We find a significant improvement of the identified risk factors. Also, the two employed outcome quality indicators improve significantly. The improvements are driven by nursing homes with low quality in the first evaluation. Conclusion To the extent that this can be interpreted as evidence that public reporting positively affects the (reported) quality in nursing homes, policy makers should carefully choose indicators reflecting care-sensitive quality.
External Organisation(s): University Hospital Düsseldorf
University of Duisburg-Essen
Paderborn University
RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research
Type: Article
Journal: HEALTH POLICY
Volume: 120
Pages: 1162-1170
No. of pages: 9
ISSN: 0168-8510
Publication date: 01.10.2016
Publication status: Published
Peer reviewed: Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas: Health Policy
Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being
Electronic version(s): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2016.09.004 (Access: Closed)