New Web site helps patients check out quality of health care in area

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Sep. 27, 2009
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

COMPARING HOSPITALS: New Web site helps patients check out quality of health care in area

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By JOHN PRZYBYS
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

As Americans debate -- loudly -- what their health care system should or should not look like, it's easy to forget that they already are some of the most educated health care consumers in the world.

Thanks to Web sites, online physician reviews and media reports on the latest in prevention, care and treatment, Americans have countless avenues for finding out about whatever it is that ails them.

Among the abundance of information, there's the Hospital Compare Web site, operated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which provides consumers with head-to-head comparisons of the quality of care offered at hospitals in their area.

The Web site -- www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov -- is similar to other federal government sites that enable consumers to compare care at such facilities as nursing homes and home health agencies. Like those sites, it takes hard data and refashions it in user-friendly ways for laymen.

Hospital Compare is a product of the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Department of Health and Human Services, in association with the Hospital Quality Alliance, a public-private coalition whose members include government agencies, medical and hospital associations, and consumer groups.

The comparisons offer "just one snapshot, only one piece of information. But it's a useful piece of information to be combined with others so people can make good decisions," says Deborah Huber, vice president of Nevada programs for HealthInsight.

The nonprofit organization, as Medicare's designated quality improvement organization for Nevada and Utah, works with local hospitals and other health care providers to improve patient care and safety.

The hospital comparison program began in 2005 with 10 quality measures that examined hospitals' practices in treating such conditions as heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia, Huber says.

Since then, the program has expanded to include "process of care" measures that examine hospitals' adherence to recommended standards of care; "outcome of care" measures that look at what happens to patients after they have received hospital care; and patient experience data about the care patients received while hospitalized.

Process of care measures involve such things as whether heart surgery patients' blood glucose is kept in control after surgery and whether patients are given the right antibiotics at the right time. Data are provided by hospitals and derived directly from patient charts, Huber says.

Hospitals submit the data to a clinical data warehouse operated by Medicare. The data is double-checked. Then, the information is used to create charts consumers will find on the Hospital Compare Web site.

In contrast, data for patient experience measures are derived from post-discharge surveys of patients. Those surveys, administered by third-party agencies, ask patients about specific aspects of their hospital experience, from whether doctors and nurses always communicated well, to whether their pain was always controlled well, even to whether their rooms were clean.

On the Hospital Compare site, consumers can see how a hospital fared in each measure and compare as many as three hospitals head-to-head. The data currently found on the site was updated Sept. 17 and covers the 2008 calendar year, Huber says.

The Hospital Compare Web site and the reporting program on which it is built are intended to improve patient care and safety and promote transparency, Huber says.

"We found when you make the results of (the) system visible, you improve the quality of care you get," she says, by getting "decision-makers' attention, saying, 'Gee, we need to make this better.'"

"The other thing, and I think the real purpose," Huber adds, is that the program gives consumers an additional tool to use in making health care decisions.

When Hospital Compare was created, there "weren't a lot of" such sites available to consumers, she says. "Back then, this was kind of a novel approach, saying, 'Here's one piece of information ... you can see in your decision-making about which hospital you want to go to.'"

Huber says the survey is "something you might want to talk to your hospital about, or something you might want to talk to your doctor about: How would I use this to make a good decision?"

It's important to keep in mind that the survey doesn't offer a comprehensive breakdown of how any specific condition should be treated.

For example, the site offers data about only seven indicators of heart attack care, while "there are a lot of components of having quality heart attack care," Huber says. Also, data on the site offer "just a limited picture to any one kind of patient."

Similarly, Huber says, "when you're going to have surgery, there are a lot of different things that are important."

At the same time, the information on the site can help patients "ask better questions," Huber says.

In effect, the Web site and the information on it are conversational springboards that encourage patients to take a greater role in their own health care.

"We very much encourage patients to be active in health care," Huber says.

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.
 
 
 
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