Patient Evaluations of Hospitals

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

Federal health officials in recent years have tried to improve transparency in health care. But measuring how well hospitals do their job can be technical. New patient-satisfaction scores, which went online Friday, cover basic premises that just about every hospital patient and relatives 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?
• Did the patient get immediate help after pressing a call button?

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

"You don't have to be a technical expert to understand this information and its implications," said Joyce Dubow, senior adviser at 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 a particular task 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."

The government's Web site lets consumers compare up to three hospitals. Users will be able to see the scores for such items as how often nurses communicated well with their patients; hospitals nationwide averaged 73 percent on that particular question. Consumers will also be able to see how well the average hospital in their state fared on each question.

The Department of Health and Human Services has previously published hospital mortality rates and clinical measures of performance, indicating whether hospitals appropriately treated heart attacks, pneumonia and other conditions. But this is the first time the government provided comprehensive data on consumer satisfaction.

Hospitals collected the data 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 comparison Web site, nor should they. However, more than 60 percent of all patients go to a hospital for elective procedures.

Overall, federal officials said rural hospitals seemed to fare better than urban ones in 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.

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.

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