Patients can now go online to see how their hospital compares against the national averages for surgical complications, infections, medical errors and potentially avoidable deaths. All of this data is available on Medicare's Hospital Compare website.
Public reporting of hospitals' safety scores is part of Medicare's value-based purchasing program that's set to launch in October 2012. Hospitals that don't meet certain safety criteria over time will face a potential 2% reduction in Medicare payments.
CMS said earlier this year that performance measures with high compliance scores would likely be replaced by measures that need improving upon in an effort to continually raise the bar on care provided in hospitals. The administration estimates $850 million will be allocated to hospitals in fiscal year 2013 based on their overall performance on the quality measures that have been shown to improve clinical processes and patient satisfaction.
While patient advocates applaud the website's transparency, hospital groups are wary of data that might not reflect the health of the patients hospitals host and the complexity of the surgeries their physicians perform.
"We believe the data is fairly seriously flawed in the way it's calculated," Nancy Foster, vice president of quality and patient safety at the American Hospital Association, told Kaiser Health News. "When inaccurate data is out there, it both misleads the public and generates a lot of activity that is unproductive in the hospital."
Daniel Cook
