Compare quality measures with 4,200 other hospitals
Compare quality measures with 4,200 other hospitals
New web site facilitates benchmarking
A new web site launched by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Hospital Quality Alliance allows you to compare 4200 hospitals across the country, even by individual departments within hospitals.
The web site Hospital Compare (www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov) will be updated quarterly with data on heart attacks, heart failure, and pneumonia and reveals that the quality of care varies a great deal even within the walls of a single hospital, such as providing excellent care for pneumonia patients but falling short of the best care for heart attack patients.
The site gives quality managers a national benchmarking database to compare results against other hospitals and identify opportunities for improvement, explains Nancy Foster, vice president of quality and patient safety policy for the Washington, DC-based American Hospital Association.
"This is a way to identify other hospitals that excel, with which they might wish to consult, with practices that they would like to emulate," she says.
The site currently contains 17 quality measures, but more information soon will be added, including surgical infection prevention measures.
"As we move forward, we will be able to give quality managers comparative data on other aspects of hospital quality that they have not had easy access to before and will find extraordinarily helpful," Foster adds.
The hospital associations involved in the project are looking at ways to help their members improve quality, such as meetings and conference calls, and already have begun to publish information on strategies that high-scoring hospitals have implemented, Foster explains.
"We are not stopping just with the publication of data — we are actively seeking ways to effectively assist hospitals in their quality improvement efforts," she says.
In the coming months, the site will be posting data on patients’ perceptions of care using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Plans — HCAHPS — survey instrument developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and CMS.
"In some aspects, this should be comparable to data that hospitals have gotten from their own patient survey vendors, but this will expand the number of participating hospitals across the nation," Foster says.
Using publicly reported quality data to compare hospitals hasn’t really caught on yet with the general public, she acknowledges.
"There are not as big a number of consumers going to the web site as we would hope," Foster points out.
"But when data on patients’ experience of care are posted, we expect that will attract more people to the site. That is more easily understood by people than measures of beta-blockers and aspirin, in terms of their own decision making," she adds.
[For more information, contact:
- Nancy Foster, Vice President, Quality and Patient Safety Policy, American Hospital Association, 325 7th St., N.W., Suite 700, Washington, DC 20004. Phone: (202) 638-1100. E-mail: [email protected].
- If you have suggestions for how to improve the Hospital Compare site, go to the American Hospital Association web site (www.aha.org.) Click on "Hospital Quality Alliance," "Contact Us."]
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