Know how your hospital performs on quality measures?

Did you know hospitals that participate with CMS (translation: accepts Medicare patients) are required to submit quality measures on a variety of diagnosis such as Heart Attack, Pneumonia, and Surgery? Each quarter, hospitals across the nation submit patient information that demonstrates whether or not a specific action took place. Some elements factor in whether or not it was done timely, correct medication given, or if the sequence of events were appropriate. (Future blogs will discuss more in detail each measure). This information can be helpful when deciding what hospital you should choose.

WhereToFindCare.com uses this information and simplifies into one value called Quality Score - Government. When you search for a hospital in your area, this score is displayed in your search results and on each hospital's home page. A screenprint of search in my area is shown above. You can see that the Quality Score (yellow highlight) ranges from 100% to 71%.

Each hospital's Quality Score is the percentage of measures that met or exceeded the national average. Sometimes, however, CMS feels a hospital did not have enough patients to make a judgment on its quality. In these cases, those measures are not included in this Quality Score. Detailed quality information by measure is available on the Quality tab of each hospital's home page.

To understand how your hospital rates go to WhereToFindCare.com.