"Consumers need reliable, relevant information to help them make health care decisions for themselves and their families," said Mark D. Smith, M.D., M.B.A., president and chief executive officer of the California HealthCare Foundation, which funded development of the new site. "CalHospitalCompare provides hospital performance ratings in an easy-to-read, understandable format."
Fifteen states, including Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas, have developed hospital report cards in response to demands from the public and regulators for more transparency about health care quality, although none are as comprehensive as CalHospitalCompare. The site offers exclusive information on hospital performance, including measures on patient experience that are not included in other sites. The site was developed with input from consumer focus groups to ensure a clear, easy-to-understand format.
The free service allows consumers to search for hospitals by location, name, or medical condition. Hospitals are rated on 50 performance indicators, including patient satisfaction measures and specific conditions, such as heart disease, maternity, and pneumonia.
CalHospitalCompare is the result of a two-year collaboration by the California Hospital Assessment and Reporting Taskforce (CHART), whose members include hospitals, health plans, doctors and nurses, consumer groups, employers, and the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF). The data collection and analysis was performed by the University of California, San Francisco's Institute for Health Policy Studies.
"This collaboration offers a powerful example of how organizations with divergent interests can cooperate to develop a single standard for public reporting, creating the health care transparency that regulators and the public are demanding,'' said Bruce Spurlock, M.D., chair of the CHART committee. "The standardized measures of hospital performance are important not only for consumers, but also for the hospitals themselves to use as benchmarks for quality improvement."
Beyond consumers, CalHospitalCompare is also intended to benefit health care organizations. The report card provides health plans with relevant information to make decisions about which hospitals to include in their networks and offers hospitals reliable data to help improve the quality of care at their facilities. CalHospitalCompare can also benefit physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals who may use the data to make referral decisions.
CalHospitalCompare will be updated regularly with new measures to enhance the consumer experience. Future enhancements will include a Spanish-language version and an expanding set of performance measures; specifically, pediatric and intensive care measures will be added later this year.
