TY - JOUR

T1 - Public reporting and the quality of care of German nursing homes

AU - Herr, Annika

AU - Nguyen, Thu Van

AU - Schmitz, Hendrik

N1 - Funding Information: We thank Ulrich Heimeshoff, Florian Heiß, Christian Pfarr, and Amela Saric as well as participants of the DICE brown-bag seminar 2014, the CINCH Academy 2014, the DIBOGS workshop in Fürth 2014, and the EARIE conference in Munich 2015 for valuable comments. We also thank the editor and two anonymous referees for helpful comments to improve the paper. Financial support from the BMBF (grant number 01EH1102A ) is gratefully acknowledged.

PY - 2016/10/1

Y1 - 2016/10/1

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Information

KW - Long-term care

KW - Nursing homes

KW - Public reporting

KW - Quality

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84995390458&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.healthpol.2016.09.004

DO - 10.1016/j.healthpol.2016.09.004

M3 - Article

C2 - 27671099

AN - SCOPUS:84995390458

VL - 120

SP - 1162

EP - 1170

JO - HEALTH POLICY

JF - HEALTH POLICY

SN - 0168-8510

IS - 10

ER -