Healthcare Transparency

What does Healthcare Transparency mean, and why is it important to you as a healthcare consumer? Dr. Patrick Cawley of the Medical University of South Carolina explains why this topic is becoming more prevalent in today's medical environment.

For a long time, you know in healthcare, we get so focused on the patient and being private, which is good but at the same time that lands to a culture of not wanting to share information. I was also—the culture is affected by lawsuits so, we don’t want to share information. But what’s come out in the last approximately 10 years is that actually by sharing more information, by opening things up, by being more transparent, that leads to better patient safety, it leads to better quality and actually leads to less lawsuits. But at the same time you can do all that and actually maintain patient privacy. Now it sounds very basic and almost primitive to say that but I would say 15, 20 years ago in healthcare, that was not the general belief, that was not the culture but hopefully today, we’re there and I think what you're going to see over the next five years is just increasing transparency, that you’ll be able to see anything you want about the hospital you're in or the doctor you're seeing or the clinic you're going to, patient waiting times, patient satisfaction surveys, infection rates, how good the hospital does a procedure, do patients die at this hospital, does this hospital treat real sick patients, will they treat their well patients? I think all of that is going to come out. I think it’s a good movement which need to keep pushing in getting this information out.