Shop Around for Hospitals As Medicare Patients Rate Them

USA Today reports that "The government's campaign promoting the website by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) comes amid a flurry of efforts by states and the private sector to rate medical providers. The movement is fueled by demands from employers and consumer groups, including AARP and the Consumers Union, for more information about cost and quality."

The hospital ratings include information on how well hospitals follow recommended care for heart attacks, pneumonia and surgery, and has patient satisfaction information.

The program is called Hospital Compare. The two-year-old online resource provides information about hospital outcomes, care quality and procedure costs for Medicare patients that can be used to compare hospitals and state and national benchmarks.

National average among hospitals is 67 percent.

The Hospital Outcome of Care Measures include the 30-day Risk-Adjusted Death (Mortality) rates and are produced from Medicare claims and enrollment data using a complex statistical model. The model predicts patient deaths for any cause within 30 days of hospital admission for heart attack or heart failure, whether the patients die while still in the hospital or after discharge. Thirty-day mortality is used because this is the time period when deaths are most likely to be related to the care patients received in the hospital. Deaths that occur outside the hospital within 30 days are included along with deaths that occur in the hospital, because some hospitals discharge patients sooner than others. By "risk-adjusted" we mean that the model calculates a death (mortality) rate that adjusts for the kinds of patient who go to that hospital so that hospitals that take care of sicker patients won’t have a worse rate just because their patients were sicker before they arrived at the hospital.

Prepared by reports of NickNoyes and Hospital Compare.