Compare Hospital Care With Online Tool

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have launched a new tool that allows people to compare the quality of hospital care all over the US. It's available at http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov .

You may compare hospital care by institution name or by location. I chose hospitals in Dallas, Texas and got 13 results. Results list the name and address of the hospital, phone number, whether or not they have an emergency room, and whether they're accredited by private, nationally-recognized groups.

Each hospital listing has a checkbox to its left. Click on the checkboxes of the hospitals you want to compare -- up to 12. Then click on "Next Step". The next step is to choose which conditions you want to compare care for -- heart attack, heart failure, or pneumonia. (You can also choose all three if you like.) I chose heart failure and pneumonia.

After that you're asked to choose which health care measures for that particular condition you'd like to check. For pneumonia, for example, you could check any or all of Percent of Patients Given Adult Smoking Cessation Advice/Counseling, Percent of Patients Given Blood Cultures Performed Before First Antibiotic Received, Percent of Patients Given Initial Antibiotic Timing, Percent of Patients Given Oxygenation Assessment, or Percent of Patients Given Pneumococcal Vaccination.

After that you'll get the data. For each health care measure you'll get a graph of what percent of patients were treated with the health care measure of interest, along with a benchmark of the average for all reporting hospitals in the US and the average of all reporting hospitals in the region at which you're looking (in this case eastern and southern Texas.) Sometimes no data is available, or the hospital doesn't report about that particular measure, or the sample size is too small for the percentage to be meaningful (in that case you can still look at the numbers, but you're advised not to give them too much credence.) Below that is an overview as to why that particular health care measure is important, and a link for viewing the result in a table format if you're not into graphs.

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