Having surgery? First, go online

Consumers can see how patients judge hospitals

By Kevin Freking, Associated Press

Saturday, March 29, 2008

What do former patients think about the care they received at your local hospitals? The government wants to make it easier for you to find out.

New patient satisfaction scores, which went online Friday, cover basic premises that just about every hospital patient and their family members can understand.

For example:

* Did doctors treat patients with courtesy and respect?

* How often were the room and bathroom cleaned?

* Was the area around the room quiet?

Those questions were included in a survey used to evaluate more than 2,500 hospitals around the country.

"You don't have to be a technical expert to understand this information and its implications," said Joyce Dubow, senior adviser at the AARP, the senior advocacy group. "If you ask somebody whether they were cared for with respect, they get that."

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said consumers - and the Medicare program - pay for care whether it's good or not.

Informing consumers about how well a hospital performs or how much it charges for a particular service will serve as incentives for health care providers to do better.

"The current sector is all about volume," Leavitt said. "The future is about value."

Data was collected by hospitals from a random sample of patients from October 2006 and June 2007. The government led development of the survey, which was administered 48 hours to six weeks after the patients were discharged.

Federal officials said they recognize that patients needing emergency care won't use the Web site, nor should they. But more than 60 percent of all patients go to a hospital for elective procedures.

"Ultimately, this tool benefits everyone," said Rich Umbdenstock, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association. "It helps consumers and patients find out how often a hospital provides certain aspects of care while allowing hospitals to focus care improvement efforts on areas where patients feel it is most needed."

Overall, federal officials said rural hospitals seemed to fare better than urban ones when it came several measures of patient satisfaction.

"I think that has to do with rural hospitals being more of a fabric of the community in rural areas," said Herb Kuhn, acting deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Officials acknowledge that few consumers compare quality information about insurance plans, hospitals and other providers to make decisions about their care.

A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey estimated that fewer than one in five patients did. However, that's an increase from 12 percent in 2000.

Leavitt acknowledged that efforts to evaluate the quality of health care are lacking. He likened the current situation to the earliest of video games, a table tennis game called Pong.

"We're not very good at this, but we're making a lot of progress," he said.

What you can learn

In words, charts and graphs, hospitalcompare. hhs.gov helps search out:

* Geography: Which facilities provide what services.

* Procedures, conditions: Search out hospitals by need, for instance for heart attack, lung disease, chest pain, diabetes care. Or abdominal surgery, back surgery and female reproductive procedures.

* Process of care: Specific measures of how well hospitals treat heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia, and prevent surgical infection.

* Outcomes: Includes in-hospital and 30 days-after-discharge mortality rates for heart attack and heart failure.

* Patient experiences: A survey of what patients say about their hospital care and whether they would recommend a facility.

* Cost and payment: Average charges for some procedures, compared with national average, and Medicare payments,.

• March 30, 2008

  4:27 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  SASQUATCH writes:

  AND IF YOUR PLANNED SURGERY IS SINGLE-PAYER... then you better G-E-T in line.