Public reporting in five health care areas: A comparative content analysis across nine countries

Background: Public reporting is crucial to enhance transparency, accountability, and informed provider choice. Therefore, providing accessible and reliable information on provider performance and activities is key for all healthcare areas and the utilization of information by patients, providers and related audiences. Objective: This study provides an extensive analysis of public reporting websites across nine high income countries, focusing on five healthcare areas, and aims to understand how these websites support patients in making informed choices about healthcare providers. Methods: We apply a comparative cross-country analysis to examine public reporting websites based on a framework consisting of five components: healthcare area, objectives and target audience, quality dimensions, data collection and methodology for quality indicator calculation, and visualization. Using literature and internet search as well as expert interviews, we selected 20 public reporting websites across nine high-income countries. Results: The websites vary widely within and across countries for most components of our framework. Notably, we found that within countries, same data used by different websites can lead to confusing or even contradictory information about the same provider, depending on the websites' reporting methods and data usage. Conclusion: The findings suggest that establishing national standards for public reporting may reduce the risk of presenting contradictory information to patients and thus, improve provider choice. Our results lay the basis for developing such national standards.