New Database Helps Assess Hospital Quality

July 15, 2004 -- The nation's largest health care accrediting organization launched a web site Wednesday designed to help consumers compare the quality of treatment at thousands of U.S. hospitals and other facilities.

The site lets consumers search for information on up to 16,000 hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics and also allows them to directly compare facilities with others within the state or on a national level.

At present the site will allow a consumer to evaluate performance at a specific health care organization on patient care in four areas: heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, and pregnancy.

Site Will Give Vital Information

But backers of the site, called Quality Check, say that as the list grows it will help consumers gain sorely needed objective information about health care quality and drive hospitals to improve lest they receive poor grades that the public sees.

"It's not a subtle message. That's the message," says Dennis S. O'Leary, MD, president of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), an independent non-profit organization that keeps the nation's largest database of health care organizations' compliance with health care standards.

JCAHO collects performance data and performs inspections on hospitals and other facilities and uses the information to accredit them. The group has made reporting to the Quality Check web site mandatory for all facilities that want its seal of approval, O'Leary says.

Consumers visiting the site at www.qualitycheck.org can seek out hospitals by zip code, state, or specialty. The site generates a series of grades in the form of pluses, checks, or minuses depending on how well the facilities meet a set of care standards scientifically proven to improve care.

For example, the site grades hospitals on how often they succeed in giving aspirin to heart attack patients or oxygen assessments to pneumonia patients, both treatments which have been shown to improve survival.

Overall survival rates are also listed for patients suffering heart attack and for infant death rates. Hospitals that beat the national average by a significant amount earn a plus, while those that fall below get a minus.

"It is a heads up to the organization that it needs to explore why it got a minus," O'Leary says.

Still, the site remains at a relatively early stage of development. Participating hospitals are required to report to the site on only three of the four measures, limiting information in some areas. Only 900 of the 3,500 hospitals listed on the site report on the quality of their pregnancy care, for example.

More Information to Come

Advocates praise the site as an important step forward in a health system that generally does not provide consumers with reliable information on health care quality.

"People go on word of mouth, and word of mouth means nothing," says Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families.