The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA) and the nation's hospitals
are working together to create and publicly report hospital quality information.
This information measures how well hospitals care for their patients,
whether the care was paid for by Medicare, Medicaid, or a private health insurance plan.
The hospital quality measures on this website show recommended treatments
for some of the most common and costly conditions that hospitals treat. Research
has shown that these treatments provide the best results for most patients with
those conditions and are an important part of the patients' overall care.
Hospitals, doctors, scientists, and other health care professionals agree that
these quality measures give a good snapshot of the quality of care that hospitals give.
Hospitals should try to give all of their patients the
recommended care when it is appropriate. The goal for each measure is 100 percent.
You should know, however, that a hospital's quality is more than just its scores on
these measures. Hospitals provide care for other illnesses and conditions for which
measures are still under development. A hospital should be able to tell you what
steps it is taking to improve its care. The information you will find on this website
is intended to help you when you talk with your physician or hospital about
how you can best get the care you need.
Patients and Their Families
If you are a patient or someone helping a patient with his or her health care
decisions, you can use this information to do the following:
- Talk to your health care provider and local hospital staff about what this
information means and how it can be used to make health care decisions.
- View information on other websites about hospital quality. (See
Related Websites
)
- Review the performance of hospitals in your state. (Perform a new
Search
)
- Gather other information about hospitals. (See
Resources
)
Health Professionals
Hospitals and health care professionals can use this information to do the following:
- Review the performance of hospitals in your area.
- Identify opportunities for quality improvement.
- Answer patients' questions and educate them about their hospital choices.
To provide feedback on this section of the website or to suggest ways to
improve it, go to the feedback tool
and let us know what you think.
Information about Hospital Performance
Hospital performance rates tell you the proportion of cases where a hospital
gave the recommended treatment. Only patients meeting certain criteria
for a measure are included in the calculation of the rate for a measure. A rate
of 88% means that the hospital provided the recommended process of care 88% of
the time. For example, the rates for aspirin at discharge for patients who have had an
acute myocardial infarction -- a heart attack -- tell you the percentage of patients who received
a prescription for aspirin before they were discharged from the hospital.
Hospitals with effective quality improvement programs are always working toward the goal of
giving the right care to the right patient at the right time.
The information posted on this website comes from the quality data submitted by hospitals
to the QIO Clinical Data Warehouse for all inpatient discharges. Except where noted, the
data reflect twelve months of experience and is updated on a rolling basis.
For the reporting period for each measure, please refer to the specific bar graphs.
Information about hospitals reporting in Hospital Compare
Many hospitals reporting data in Hospital Compare have been providing information
through the HQA initiative since October 2003. The Hospital Compare tool presents
data from hospitals that volunteered to participate in the initiative and submitted
data for public reporting. Most of these are short-term
acute care hospitals
that, by providing information on measures identified by the Secretary of HHS,
became eligible to receive an incentive payment for voluntary submission of data that
was initially established by Section 501(b) of the Medicare Modernization Act (MMA),
and was extended and expanded by Section 5001(a) of the Deficit Reduction Act. A
substantial proportion of these hospitals have also volunteered to provide information for
Hospital Compare on measures, not initially included in the financial
incentive arrangement.
Hospital Compare also reflects data submitted voluntarily by
critical access hospitals.
Critical access hospitals (CAHs) are small, rural facilities that are not
eligible for the additional incentive payment established by the MMA. For these facilities,
any hospital that volunteers to participate and submits cases for one or more measures can
choose to have any or all of its data displayed on this website.
Recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services began reporting children’s asthma
care measures. These data are submitted to
The Joint Commission
by both accredited
children's hospitals
and accredited general
acute care hospitals
with pediatric units.
In addition, psychiatric and rehabilitation hospitals have also volunteered to participate in the HQA initiative. Despite volunteering to submit data on quality for public reporting, these hospitals are not currently shown because the clinical conditions currently measured (evaluating care of patients who experience heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgery and children's asthma) are not commonly treated in those settings. These hospitals may have data included at some point in the future when new quality measures are added.
Explanation of Footnotes
These are the footnotes (in italics) that are used in Hospital Compare:
- Source: Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) Survey.
- This is the middle range of payments for the most typical cases treated in this geographic area for this condition or procedure.
- Number of Medicare Patients Treated: The number of discharges the hospital treated for each MS-DRG from October 2007 through September 2008. The United States and average of Medicare Patients does not include hospitals with zero cases.
- The payment and volume information is for acute care hospitals. Critical access hospitals (CAH) are not included because they are paid using another method.
- Payment cannot be computed as there were no Medicare discharges for this MS-DRG from October 2007 – September 2008.
- An asterisk (*) appears in the table where data cannot be disclosed to protect personal health information due to the small number of Medicare patients (fewer than 11).
- This hospital is currently not submitting data for Hospital Process of Care Measures, Hospital Outcome of Care Measures and/or the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) Patient Survey.
- This column shows the number of patients with Original Medicare who were admitted to the hospital for heart attack, heart failure or pneumonia conditions. The hospital may also have treated additional Medicare patients in Medicare health plans (like an HMO or PPO).
- The number of cases is too small (fewer than 25) to reliably tell how well the hospital is performing.
- The number of cases is too small (<25) to reliably tell how well a hospital is performing.
For each measure, the rate is the percent of patients for whom the treatment is appropriate. Where these numbers are small (fewer than 25 patients), the calculated rate may not accurately predict the hospital’s future performance. As the quality data base is expanded to a full rolling four quarters of data for each measure, the number of cases used to determine hospitals’ rates will likely increase, thereby increasing the reliability and stability of the rates. Note: This footnote does not necessarily reflect hospital size or overall patient volume.
- The hospital indicated that the data submitted for this measure were based on a sample of cases.
A rate may be based upon the total number of cases treated by a hospital, or for a facility with a large caseload, a rate may be based on a random sample of the cases the hospital treated. This footnote indicates that a hospital chose to submit data for a sample of its total cases (following specific rules for how to the select the cases).
- Data was collected during a shorter time period (fewer quarters) than the maximum possible time for this measure (One quarter equals three months.)
Each rate reflects the care given over a specific time period, up to a maximum of four quarters during a 12 month period. The number of quarters of data available is determined by when hospitals first began to report data using a specific measure. For example, for the ten measures in the “Starter Set”, the maximum number of quarters for which a hospital could have provided data is four quarters. For measures added more recently, the maximum will be fewer than four quarters. This footnote indicates that the hospital's rate was based on data from fewer than the maximum possible number of quarters that the measure was generally collected.
- Inaccurate information submitted and suppressed for one or more quarters.
Hospitals are required to submit accurate, reportable data to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The rates for these measures were calculated by excluding data that had been suppressed for one or more quarters because they were identified as inaccurate.
- No data is available from the hospital for this measure.
Hospitals volunteer to provide data for reporting on Hospital Compare. This footnote is applied when the hospital did not submit any cases for a measure.
- Fewer than 100 patients completed the HCAHPS survey. Use these rates with caution, as the number of surveys may be too low to reliably assess hospital performance.
The number of completed surveys the hospital or its vendor provided to CMS is less than 100.
- Survey results are based on less than 12 months of data.
This footnote is applied when HCAHPS results are based on less than 12 months of survey data.
- Survey results are not available for this period.
This footnote is applied when a hospital did not participate in HCAHPS, did not collect sufficient HCAHPS data for public reporting purposes, or chose to suppress their HCAHPS results.
- No patients were eligible for the HCAHPS Survey.
This footnote is applied when a hospital has no patients eligible to participate in the HCAHPS survey.
- A state average was not calculated because too few hospitals in the state submitted data.
This footnote is applied when too few hospitals submitted data.
- There were discrepancies in the data collection process.
This footnote is applied when there have been deviations from HCAHPS data collection protocols. CMS is working with survey vendors and/or hospitals to
correct this situation.
In addition, the notation "0 patients" is applied when a hospital provided care to patients with a condition, such as pneumonia, but the cases that the hospital submitted did not meet the specific criteria for being included in the calculation of the measure.
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