The Impact of Combining Conformance and Experiential Quality on Hospitals’ Readmissions and Cost Performance

To investigate the opportunity for hospitals to achieve better care at lower cost, we examine two key process quality measures, conformance quality and experiential quality, and two measures of performance, readmission rate and cost per discharge. Conformance quality represents a hospital’s level of adherence to evidence-based standards of care, whereas experiential quality represents the level of interaction between hospital’s caregivers and patients. Analyzing six years of data from 3,474 U.S. acute care hospitals, we find that combining conformance and experiential quality results in lower readmission rates. However, conformance quality and experiential quality each independently increase cost per discharge, which suggests that a readmissions–costs trade-off is unavoidable. To investigate this further, we conduct post hoc analyses by distinguishing between the granular elements of experiential quality (EQ) based on task type: response-focused EQ and communication-focused EQ. Response-focused EQ measure...