Template matching for hospital comparison: an application to birth event data in Italy

Quality evaluation in healthcare has obtained a growing attention in the statistical literature. In order to evaluate hospital performances by comparing hospital outcomes it is necessary to remove the bias due to the different case-mix in each hospital, which is usually done using statistical modeling as a risk adjustment tool. Template matching is a new matching approach allowing to remove bias selection in a multi-treatment setting, resulting in a clean and easily interpretable evaluation. We adopted this method to compare quality indicators of hospital deliveries obtained from official birth event abstracts across the hospitals of two Italian regions: Sardinia and Lombardy. The results suggest that this method allows a fair comparison among providers, making easier for the policy makers the identification of potential distortions in patients' selection and outcomes.