Dr. Nicholas LaRusso welcomes intelligent patients who demand that hospitals make health outcomes transparent to the public.

Question: How can hospitals improve health outcomes?

Nicholas LaRusso: Increasingly we’re going to have a much more demanding set of consumers in health care. That’s going to result in, and that’s the good thing, that’s going to result in the need for us to be able to make transparent to them the concrete outcomes of what it is we’re providing.

For example, if a patient needs a liver transplant, they’re going to be able to go online and find out who does the most transplants? Who does the most transplants from my particular condition? What they should be able to find out is, what’s the approximate range of cost? And what’s the likelihood that I’m going to get out of the hospital in a week, two weeks, three weeks? How many patients that have this kind of a transplant need another operation?

These are the outcomes that we have to be accountable for, and that we need to make transparent to the public. I think that’s the right thing to do.

If we believe, and we do at Mayo, the Mayo mantra which is the needs of the patient come first. They have to be fully informed and we have to be held accountable for the outcomes of the things that we do.

Recorded on: June 24, 2009.