The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has threatened to take enforcement action on private hospitals and doctors not supplying data about the quality of care they are providing.
The warning was issued alongside an open letter to the private healthcare industry highlighting there are still some consultants and hospitals who have made little or no effort to comply with legally-binding obligations in supplying data.
CMA executive director of markets and mergers David Stewart emphasised that treatment outcome data could help patients make better decisions, improve care quality and patient safety.
Speaking at the LaingBuisson private acute care conference Stewart issued the wake-up call and said the use of data was here to stay.
“We’re never going back to a world where the kind of data on prices and outcomes is not part of the resources that are available in the system to help patient pathways,” he said.
After thanking the thousands of consultants and hundreds of hospitals who have successfully provided their data to the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) and pledging to support those who were working to get there, he addressed those ignoring the issue.
This is particularly the “long tail of consultants and hospitals that have lower volumes in the private sector where we can see there are still significant proportions that are not complying”.
“If you’ve basically been turning your back on this, but there are parts of the sector where this message has to filter through… the key thing to be aware of is that we are moving to a new phase in our work,” Stewart continued.
“No-one in the CMA wants to be involved in taking enforcement action in relation to healthcare providers, hospitals or consultants, we would very much rather they were spending their time on patients.
“But ultimately to get the critical mass for this system to become the kind of self-sustaining and effective system it can be for patients, it’s really important that we don’t break faith with the people who’ve done the right thing by making sure there are consequences for the people who haven’t.
“So there will be further enforcement activity from the CMA.”
‘Needs conforming people’
Asked why it had taken so long to get to this point, PHIN CEO Dr Ian Gargan said it was complex but could not be done without the help PHIN’s provider members and stakeholders.
“It’s very complex subject to collect all the data that’s required to adhere to the notes and articles in the CMA order,” he said.
“We all know competition breeds better performance and better productivity – that’s the whole point of the CMA order, to get the data out there.
“But the competition can only happen if the data is accurate and if we have conforming people and we’re working closely with the consultants or with the hospitals to provide us that data.”
He noted that it could be very complicated for each hospital to collect data as there were different sources and it was important not to just “dump all the data out there without contextualising it and helping to educate the patients and stakeholders about the usefulness of the data”.
Care Quality Commission head of inspection Carolyn Jenkinson said data was a key part of how the regulator operated but added it was not the only factor that went into its ratings and closure decisions.
“In the new way of regulation, we will be taking even more interest perhaps than we do now with our data, but it won’t be the be all and end all. We’ll still want to try and relate the patient experience with the data,” she said.
“A really recent example from a few weeks ago is where we suspended a clinical service, a cancer service, even though the data showed outcomes for patients were okay.
“But we’ve still taken that step to suspend it because there were other things pointing to risk for that service, so it’s not the only thing that we will look at, but it’s an important part.”
Is it relevant to patient experience?
However, Independent Doctors Federation consultant orthopaedic surgeon Susan Alexander argued that the data being collected was not the most relevant to show good quality care and said insurers should also be included in the regime.
“One of the concerns among the clinicians is what data is being collected,” she said.
“So if you are judging a doctor or a surgeon on length of stay, that is not necessarily a true representation of how good that doctor is as a clinician.
“Because what you want to know when things went wrong is if they recognise your concerns. Were they kind? Were they quick and acting to solve your problem?
“That is not going to be found out by the data that PHIN is currently collecting, so this is not relevant data for the patient experience, and that’s a major problem.”