Smart shopping for hospital care

Want to know which hospital is best suited to treat your medical condition? Or would you simply like to know how other patients really felt about their care while being treated at your local hospital? New data released last week can help you decide without having to rely on word-of-mouth recommendations or other biased information.

A new consumer Web site, Hospital Compare, offers data from about 2,500 hospitals that care for adult patients, which can allow you to make an informed choice about hospital care.

The information, known as HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems), allows consumers to see how frequently hospitals offer treatments for heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia and surgical patients. The HCAHPS information was collected through surveys given to patients after they received hospital care. Among the 27 survey topics patients responded to were:

• Communication with doctors and nurses
• Cleanliness of the hospital
• Pain management
• Information received when being discharged from the hospital
• Willingness to recommend the facility to others

Information is to be updated quarterly and data from most of the nation’s hospitals is to be appear on the site by year’s end.

Hospital Compare is the result of a cooperative effort among members of the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In presenting the site to members of the media, Michael O. Leavitt, U.S. Health and Human Services secretary said, “This is not about eliminating anyone. This is about improving everyone.” And it’s also about informing everyone.

Check it out for yourself at www.HospitalCompare.hhs.gov.

—Gayle T. Williams, deputy editor