Employers Seek Easier Ways to Assess Hospital Quality Scores

The Leapfrog Group, a coalition of large employers working to improve care quality at lower costs, has contracted with analytics vendor Castlight Health to improve the usability of the annual Leapfrog Hospital Survey for employers and consumers.


The Leapfrog Group, a coalition of large employers working to improve care quality at lower costs, has contracted with analytics vendor Castlight Health to improve the usability of the annual Leapfrog Hospital Survey for employers and consumers.

More than 1,430 hospitals voluntarily participated in the last annual survey in 2013, which assesses safety and quality performance across a spectrum of services, processes and structures.

Castlight offers a cloud-based platform to help employers better manage healthcare costs. The platform is designed to give employees comprehensive information to track spending and quality to make better healthcare choices, which in turn enables employers to analyze and reduce their overall program costs. For employers, the platform combines pricing, clinical quality and user satisfaction data with analytics software to calculate costs and identify patterns of “inefficient behavior” for large populations of employees and their families, helping employers optimize benefit plans, attempt to reduce inefficient outcomes and foster behavioral change.

Now, Castlight, which recently became a publicly traded company, will analyze the 2013 results focusing on specific areas for improvement, such as early elective deliveries and infections.  The analyses will cover data across the nation, by region and by each of 28 survey metrics, according to a Leapfrog announcement. The goal is to offer graphical presentations to make it easier for employers and consumers to understand hospital performance. Leapfrog will release findings this spring.