Knowledge sharing networks related to hospital quality measurement and reporting

With the growing momentum toward hospital quality reporting by public payers, hospitals face increasing pressures to improve their medical record documentation and administrative data coding performance. The literature on "professional complex systems" has put forth various strategies for improving the performance of professional organizations. In doing so, it has emphasized the importance of creating effective structures for knowledge sharing and organizational learning. This study integrates knowledge networks and professional organizations literatures to develop hypotheses related to knowledge sharing network effectiveness in professional organizations.

Correspondingly, this study explores the relationship between the organizational knowledge sharing structure related to quality and hospital coding performance related to quality. Simultaneously, this study seeks to identify other organizational characteristics associated with coding for quality measurement. The purpose is to identify strategies not only for improving hospital coding performance but also for the organization to adapt to the changing environment.

An exploratory and comparative research design is used. The sample is composed of four hospitals, two showing "good-coding" performance for quality measurement and two showing "poor-coding" performance. Interviews and surveys are conducted with administrators and staff in the quality, medical staff, and coding subgroups in each facility. Survey data are subjected to social network analysis to examine knowledge sharing structures.

This study finds that good-coding performance is systematically associated with a knowledge sharing network structure rich in brokerage and hierarchy (with leaders connecting different professional subgroups to each other and to the external environment) rather than in density (where everyone is directly connected to everyone else). From a health care management perspective, this study suggests that to improve hospital coding performance, senior administrators must undertake proactive and unceasing efforts to coordinate knowledge exchange across physician and coding subgroups and connect these subgroups with the changing external environment.