Comparing Health Plan and Provider Quality Scores to Each Other

The simplest and most common strategy is to compare each entity’s performance to the average performance of all the entities you are rating.

Advantages of Comparing to the Community Average

• You have all the information you need to make the comparison right within your data set.
• Since people will generally be making choices from among the plans/providers in your community (and hopefully all of them are reporting), it is intuitive to focus people’s attention on comparisons within the community.
• The plans and providers themselves are going to be particularly interested in how they compare to each other, so these comparisons should also help drive quality improvement.

Disadvantages of Comparing to the Community Average

• Many members of the public think that "average" is "mediocre," rather than defining it in formal statistical terms. Many health care professionals agree, in the sense that everyone should be striving to be the best, not merely "average."
• If everyone is doing very well, or very poorly, then the average may be misleading. A provider with a much higher score than average could still be doing quite poorly and one with a much lower score could still be doing quite well.
• Many members of the public, including local policy makers, may be interested in how the entire community is doing compared to those outside the community.