Wondering how patients feel about the care they receive at your facility or a neighboring one? Now you can access patient satisfaction information through the Joint Commission's Quality Check Web site.

The accreditation agency began posting data from the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems on the site this month. Quality Check already houses information about healthcare facilities' accreditation status and compliance with National Patient Safety Goals and National Quality Improvement Goals.

The CAHPS data adds patient satisfaction to the mix, allowing users to view patients' assessments of their communication with doctors and nurses, a facility's cleanliness and atmosphere, pain management efforts and discharge information. The Joint Commission says it will update the information quarterly. Quality Check users can search healthcare organizations by name, Zip code or state.

Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems is a program sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to develop standardized surveys to gauge patients' experiences at healthcare facilities. Its information is also available from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Hospital Compare Web site.

Irene Tsikitas

The American Hospital Association says eight out of 10 hospitals it has surveyed blame the slumping economy for delaying such necessary projects as facility upgrades and clinical improvement and IT improvements.

The 639 hospitals surveyed in December 2008 and January 2009 reported increased difficulties in borrowing funds through tax-exempt bonds and bank loans and also a slowing of philanthropic donations. In the meantime, Wall Street's troubles have drained hospitals' savings, reports the AHA.

Close to half of the hospitals surveyed say the inability to secure funding has resulted in the postponement of facility improvement projects slated to begin within the next six months or the delay of projects already in progress. The survey notes 65 percent of hospitals polled say the projects put on hold were intended to improve surgical and inpatient care.

"Stopping these projects also means new jobs are not created within the healthcare field or for construction workers, contractors, IT specialists and others," says AHA president and CEO Rich Umbdenstock. "The ripple effects of the capital crunch on employment are cause for great concern."

The AHA says postponing facility upgrades makes it difficult to improve quality of care, efficiency and coordination of care, which jeopardizes hospitals' abilities to meet the healthcare needs of the communities they serve.

Daniel Cook

While unicompartmental knee replacement is often seen as a temporary treatment for older patients with osteoarthritis, it shows better results 15 years post-surgery than total replacement, according to a study from the Avon Orthopaedic Centre in Bristol, England.

"The results for UKR are as good as those for TKR and show no greater tendency to fail for at least 15 years," write the authors, who followed 94 patients for 15 years and reported their results in the January issue of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery British edition.

Patients in the UKR group saw fewer complications and a better range of motion, and fewer required revision surgery. At 15 years, 10.1 percent of UKRs had been revised, as compared to 21.3 percent of TKR procedures.

"There is no doubt that a good UKR is better than a good TKR from the point of view of function," writes Robin Allum, FRCS, a consultant orthopedic surgeon at Wexham Park Hospital in Berkshire, U.K., in an accompanying commentary. "TKR however is on the whole a reliable procedure that gives adequate results."

He noted that the results are based on just 94 patients, in contrast to shorter-term joint registry studies of as many as 80,697 patients that provide differing results.

Kent Steinriede

If you're like most of the 31 readers who answered last week's online poll, accreditation surveyors are, for the most part, inspecting your facility thoroughly but not going overboard. When asked to rate their last accreditation survey, 58 percent rated the level of inspection as "just right," 32 percent said it was "too picky" and 10 percent said it "wasn't picky enough."

This week poll asks how many GPOs your facility belongs to. Go to our front page to participate in the poll and view real-time results.

Dan O'Connor