Hospital Compare Website to be Promoted Tomorrow in
58 Daily Newspapers
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ ads
highlight patient ratings for over 1,000 hospitals
May 20, 2008 – Fifty-eight daily newspapers in the
U.S. will be running advertisements tomorrow promoting the Hospital
Compare website managed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
(CMS). The ads provide scores from two of the 26 quality and patient
satisfaction measures on the Website for a sample of hospitals in the
community covered by each newspaper.
The 26 quality measures allow patients to better
understand 10 key aspects of the patient experience, according to the
announcement.
It also said the Department of Health and Human
Services, the parent department for CMS, is launching this as the first
national print advertising campaign focusing on the quality of care
available in the nation’s hospitals.
“These ads – and Hospital Compare – are intended to
give consumers more information for making choices about their health
care,” said HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt. “This brings us closer to
meeting the goal of using new technologies to make the quality of health
care services all across the nation more transparent to the public.”
“The newspaper ads are designed to raise awareness
about the important information on Hospital Compare,” said CMS Acting
Administrator Kerry Weems.
“Patients and their family members can use this
information to see how well their hospitals are providing care, and
hospitals can use the data to focus on areas where there is opportunity
to improve the quality of care.”
The ads highlight two measures found on
www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, a Web site that allows users to
compare the quality of care provided in nearly 4,000 hospitals across
the nation.
The newspaper ad, aimed at reaching areas covered
by about 1,000 of these hospitals, invites readers to “Compare the
Quality of Your Local Hospitals” and contains the following information:
● Percentage of patients at each hospital who
always received help when they requested it, as reported by the patients
themselves
● Percentage of patients at each hospital who
were given antibiotics one hour prior to surgery, as reported by
hospitals
● The state average for each of these two
measures
The Hospital Compare ad campaign is the most recent
effort by the Department to make reliable information easy to find and
raise standards in the health care system. In addition, HHS officials
hope the ads – and the information available at Hospital Compare – will
encourage hospitals to improve the care they provide to patients.
Hospital Compare allows consumers to compare local
hospitals on measures that are critical to patients and family members,
including quality of clinical care for specific procedures, and what
patients say about their hospital experience.
On Hospital Compare, consumers will find 26 quality
of care measures that can be used to compare hospitals to each other, or
to state and national benchmarks in addition to information about the
care provided to patients with heart failure and heart attack – or acute
myocardial infarction.
The newest enhancement to Hospital Compare is the
inclusion of 10 patient experience-of-care topics that allow consumers
around the country to get a better picture of the quality of care
delivered at their local hospitals.
The patient experience-of-care information
available on Hospital Compare is collected through a new patient survey,
the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS)
survey. HCAHPS (pronounced “H-caps”) is the first national,
standardized, publicly reported survey of patients’ perspectives of
care.
Survey results reported on Hospital Compare cover
10 key aspects of the patient experience, including how often doctors
and nurses communicated well with patients, how often patients received
help quickly – one of the features in the newspaper ads – and patients’
overall rating of the hospital.
Hospital Compare was created by CMS in
collaboration with the Hospital Quality Alliance, a private/public
partnership that includes the American Hospital Association, the
Federation of American Hospitals, the Association of American Medical
Colleges, AARP and the AFL-CIO.
Hospital Compare is also supported by other major
medical associations, consumer groups, measurement and accrediting
bodies, government, and other groups who share a commitment to improving
hospital quality.
To access the Hospital Compare Web site, please
visit:
www.HospitalCompare.HHS.gov. Other tools are available at
www.medicare.gov
to compare the quality of Medicare health plans, nursing homes, home
health agencies, and dialysis facilities.
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