Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Pneumonia death rates added to Hospital Compare site
Back in May, we wrote about CMS' new and improved Hospital Compare Web site , which compares hospitals using data on dozens of quality, outcome and patient satisfaction measures.
Now CMS has added a mortality measure for pneumonia as well as measures for hospital care of children. The latter is really different, as previous information only focused on data derived from adult hospitalizations.
The measure on 30-day mortality from pneumonia joins existing 30-day mortality measures for heart failure and heart attack. CMS started reporting those heart measures last summer, and says in a press release that it has seen those rates improve in the meantime. The heart attack mortality rate dropped to 16.1% in 2008 from 16.3% in 2007, for example.
The site now includes a total of 26 process-of-care measures, three outcome measures, two children's asthma care measures, and 10 patient experience measures.
posted by Jessica Berthold at
11:59 AM
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2 Comments:
Before lauding the website, you might try it. None of the information claimed to be provided is, at least not in a way that users can access it. Searches for hospitals by zip code always turn up empty. Searching by name results, of course, in only one selection, which cannot be compared. And apparently, the database starts this year, so there are too few patients at most to make any kind of statistically meaningful comparison.
This site is less than useful. But, what else could one expect from an administration preoccupied with loading down departments of the exectuive branch with political appointess selected for their ideology, not for their effectiveness?
Thanks for your comment, Anonymous; that's really good feedback about the site's usability and usefulness. We don't mean to "laud" the site by writing about it; but we thought it might be good for physicians to know about, since patients use it, and since the whole notion of rating doctors and hospitals seems to be somewhat controversial in the physician community.
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