U.S. News & World Report, publisher of Best Hospitals and Best Children's Hospitals, today announced that Kaiser Permanente and Intermountain Healthcare will participate in the U.S. News Hospital Outcome Data Disclosure Program, a new data-collection initiative designed to evaluate hospitals more completely and give patients better information about the hospitals in their communities.
The new program allows participating hospitals and health care organizations to submit comprehensive datasets that go beyond Medicare data directly to U.S. News to use in evaluating hospitals. The initiative will help U.S. News create a more robust dataset of hospital outcome measures and gain new insights on hospital performance.
"The choice of hospital can be a matter of life and death and it's also one of the most important and costly decisions an individual makes, yet data to help patients identify the right hospital for their needs are still limited," said Ben Harder, chief of health analysis at U.S. News. "The Hospital Outcome Data Disclosure Program will improve transparency and give patients a more complete picture of hospital performance."
The new U.S. News Best Hospitals for Common Care ratings rely on a Medicare database called MedPAR, which collects data from reimbursement claims that hospitals file with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. But the information in MedPAR is available only for patients covered by traditional, fee-for-service Medicare. Information on patients 65 and older who are covered by commercial Medicare Advantage plans is incomplete and unaudited. The Hospital Outcome Data Disclosure Program allows U.S. News to include those patients and their missing data in its analysis.
These new ratings, to be released in May, will include such supplemental data from Kaiser Permanente and Intermountain. The new ratings evaluate hospitals across the country in common high-volume inpatient procedures and conditions including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart bypass surgery, congestive heart failure, hip replacement and knee replacement.
"It's important for consumers to have access to comparative data when making decisions about their health care, and we are pleased that U.S. News & World Report has determined a way to better include outcomes from value-based organizations such as Kaiser Permanente in its new ratings," said Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO Bernard J. Tyson.
Charles Sorenson, M.D., President and CEO of Intermountain Healthcare added: "Sharing this information as part of these U.S. News ratings aligns with our goal of helping patients be better informed and more engaged in decisions about their care through increased transparency."
To participate, hospitals must submit their data to independent audit conducted by an organization that meets rigorous certification standards. The verified data will then undergo data modeling and risk adjustment before being published by U.S. News.
The program is open to any hospital that can demonstrate high rates of data absent from MedPAR because of the large share of commercially covered patients of Medicare age at their facilities. At the outset, the supplemental data will only be used in the Best Hospitals for Common Care ratings. The data will not currently be used in U.S. News's annual Best Hospitals or Best Children's Hospitals rankings.
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