It’s easy to understand why hospitals in Washington state would prefer not to be publicly identified with the serious errors they make. It’s embarrassing. More than that, it could cost the hospitals business when word gets out that their patients get bedsores – or die as a result of medication errors – more often than at the competition across town.

But it’s also embarrassing, apparently, when their lawyer fires off a letter that persuades the state Department of Health to stop making such information public. Which may explain why the Washington State Hospital Association has reconsidered its objection.

Seven years ago, when the Legislature began requiring hospitals to report “adverse incidents” to the Department of Health, it wasn’t just a “gotcha” strategy. It was valuable because it offered the chance to collect data and to identify and fix problems.

Last year, in a 63-page bill meant to deal with medical malpractice concerns, the Legislature revised the 2007 statute. In so doing, it gave hospitals an opening to argue that the collected information could no longer be released on a hospital-by-hospital basis. The Department of Health reviewed the new law and agreed – much to the surprise of state Rep. Tom Campbell, a Pierce County Republican, who sponsored the bill and has been the Legislature’s chief bulldog on the issue. It didn’t help that the department took no steps to announce that it was reversing its procedure so abruptly.

Campbell raised enough of a ruckus to besiege the hospital association with protests. Getting the association to back down is a minor victory for Campbell, because the Health Department can hardly resume doing something it has concluded is illegal – at least not without an attorney general’s opinion, which has been requested.

Meanwhile, Campbell is preparing to come back in January with an ironclad bill to restore the reporting system, and the hospital association says it will back him as long as the process includes an explanation of how and why errors occur. Such a system exists in Minnesota and both the hospitals and Campbell are comfortable with that model.

While secrecy still conceals hospitals’ identity in the adverse-incident reports, the association’s assurances are promising. The Minnesota provisions would improve the 2006 Washington law that opened the doors to reinterpretation of reporting requirements.

The hospitals say correctly that raw data are subject to misinterpretation and could lead to unwise decisions. (In a life-threatening situation, would you avoid a highly regarded trauma center that reportedly has bedsore issues?)

They also say that the more the system focuses on dishing out blame, the more it deters the reporting needed to improve the delivery of health care.

Valid points, but they don’t justify withholding critical information from consumers, even if some use it more wisely than others.

In times of tension between public and institutional interests, institutions commonly find relief in secrecy. Ultimately, though, as both the hospital association and the Department of Health should have learned from this instance, more information is almost always better than less.