Want to find out how Seattle hospitals compare?
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is running ads in both Seattle daily newspapers Wednesday showing consumers how to compare services and quality of care in area hospitals by using a new Web site.
The ads, which are running in more than 50 other newspapers across the country, promote Hospital Compare, hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, a Web site that scores 26 quality and patient satisfaction measures at nearly 4,000 hospitals nationwide.
In the Seattle area, the list covers hospitals from Auburn to Everett. The site compares such categories as how much procedures -- say, gall bladder removal or heart surgeries -- cost at the different hospitals. Consumers can compare measures such as how well patients said their doctors communicated with them and how clean their rooms or bathrooms were.
Consumers can also compare Medicare payments for such things as diabetes care. For example, of the 16 hospitals in a 25-mile radius of Seattle, payments for adult diabetes care ranges from $4,292 at Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue to $6,834 at Harborview Medical Center.
"The newspaper ads are designed to raise awareness about the important information on Hospital Compare," said Kerry Weems, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a division of HHS, which placed the ads. "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 among those available on the site: the percentage of patients at each hospital who always received help when they requested it, as reported by the patients, and the percentage of patients at each hospital who were given antibiotics one hour before surgery, as reported by hospitals. The ad also shows the state average for the two.
The patient satisfaction survey results are updated quarterly and show the most recent four quarters of data at a time, said Terry Crumpton, special assistant in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid in Seattle. Process of care measures (the clinical data) is updated quarterly, as well, and the most recent four quarters of data are displayed. The next update to the Web site for these two data sets is planned for July.
The other data available on the Web site , price (cost of a procedure) and volume (how many procedures were performed), are updated annually, and will be revised in September.
More transparency in health care is a good thing, said Dr. Ed Walker, medical director at the University of Washington Medical Center, and this site shows how physicians are having more open conversations about errors and prevention.
"I bought my last car by going to Consumer Reports and looking at the comparisons," Walker said. "We have a populous who expects us to be like Consumer Reports, and while that may be a bit ahead of our time, we still have a good balance."
But Walker cautioned consumers to realize that no one measure defines a hospital, and some measures can be imprecise. For example, some measures, such as whether patient received antibiotics before a surgery, are easily defined -- there's a surgery checklist to consult or an empty bottle from the pharmacy as evidence. How long a patient had to wait to see a nurse after he or she was called is more subjective.
"How soon a nurse responded is influenced by a lot of things, including how many patients they have at one time," Walker said. "They weigh the needs of the patients simultaneously -- but we should aspire. These are our patients telling us how we're doing, and we should listen to that."
Hospitals that use electronic medical records have an easier time finding information than those who have to search through charts, he said. He said the UW Medical Center is spending a lot of time making sure physicians correctly document what happens to patients.
Swedish Medical Center agrees that the available information helps patients make better decisions about health care. In a statement, hospital representatives also encouraged people to look at all the information on Hospital Compare and to talk with physicians about the variety of factors that can affect where they should go.
The newspaper ad provides a small sample of the information that is readily available for consumers to view on Hospital Compare, the statement said, and people who see the ad should not draw conclusions about their hospital's quality of care based solely on two limited pieces of information.
"There are challenges," Walker said about the information on the Web site. "But the more transparency, the better."
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