Hospital Compare, a new service, will give Americans the ability to compare the quality of care in nearly all of the nation’s hospitals using quality information available from the Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA).
The service provides consumers with standardized assessments of the care that nearly 4,200 hospitals across the country provide to all adult patients, based on valid and reliable measures that have been shown to reflect quality of care and should help them make more informed decisions about their health care.
CMS Administrator Mark B. McClellan, M.D., Ph.D. says the service will provide stronger rewards and support for high-quality, efficient care in the nation’s hospitals, and valid, consistent measures of quality care are an important tool to help patients make sure they are getting the most for their health care dollars.
Hospital Compare is the result of a public-private collaboration of government agencies, hospitals, quality experts, purchasers, consumer groups and other health care organizations, working together to develop and implement a national strategy for hospital quality measurement and improvment of quality of care. Many hospitals have been willing to move beyond the minimum set of measures identified by the Medicare Modernization Act payment incentive provision.Hospitals can call on the expertise of Medicare’s Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) for additional assistance in further improving their quality measures.