The new pricing and volume information at Hospital Compare looks at the acute care hospital payments Medicare made for treatment of beneficiaries with certain illnesses from October 2005 through September 2006.Among the surgical procedures included in the data: cholecystectomy, hernia operations, back fusion, knee surgery and shoulder surgery. The information reflects how often Medicare patients were admitted to hospitals for the covered conditions and what Medicare pays the hospital for these services, not what beneficiaries pay. Where applicable, the appropriate quality measure is displayed for each DRG. However, there is not a direct relationship between the pricing and volume information and the quality measure information, says CMS; the quality measure information does not include the same cases associated with each DRG.
The patient survey results are reported for 10 measures (six summary measures, two individual items and two global ratings). The six summary measures include how well nurses and doctors in the hospitals communicate with patients, how responsive the hospital staff are to patient needs, how well the hospital staff helps the patient manage pain, how well the staff communicates with the patient about medicines, and whether pertinent information was provided when the patient was discharged. The two individual items address the cleanliness and quietness of the patient’s room, and the two global ratings are the overall rating of the hospital and whether the patient would recommend the hospital to others.
Data will be updated on a quarterly basis; CMS estimates more than 3,000 hospitals will be included in the next report. Further, this summer, CMS will add an additional outcome mortality measure for pneumonia, which will accompany the mortality measures for heart attack and heart failure that are currently posted on Hospital Compare. CMS will also provide more information in the display of the mortality measures with the ability to focus on the mortality measure rates, interval estimates and number of cases.
“While many hospitals already collect information on patient satisfaction for their own use, until HCAHPS there was no national standard for collecting and publicly reporting information about patients’ experiences that allowed valid comparisons to be made across hospitals locally, regionally or nationally,” says CMS.
