Wednesday, October 22, 2008

USA Hospital Patient Satisfaction Report

It's not widely known, but Medicare began collecting survey responses recently that asked patients a number of questions about their recent hospital stay. CMS has not restricted this to Medicare patients only, they call anyone who is eligible, regardless of payer. My boss was kind enough to give me the opportunity to take the data from Medicare and make a consumer-oriented report card that is easy and quick to use.

The site is AboutHealthSatisfaction.org and is completely free to use, no registration required, and does not contain ads. The source data is available on the Hospital Compare Web site put out by CMS, but it's hard to get to, hard to read, and restricts you to only a handful of hospitals to compare at a time. However, CMS makes the data freely available for download, so this is what I came up with.

Please go check it out, and let me know your thoughts and feedback here. I plan on updating the site every three months when the fresh data comes out. Right now I have three editions of the data, so you can even track numbers from quarter to quarter. Go have a look, and check back here to let me know what you think.

6 comments:

Matt said...

Excellent!

An option to view all measures simultaneously would be helpful (I'm thinking, for example, if I want to print off a comparison for Mom).

The data collection period would be useful as well. It probably varies between facilities; maybe put it on the single-provider page?

Thanks, Jaz. Another great resource making Medicare data useful. Like the AHRQ State Snapshots of Quality only even easier to use.

Anonymous said...

No need to publish this comment, but Maryland and D.C. are a little glitchy on the map.

Jaz said...

Easer Egg time! Click any hospital name in the comparison graph and you'll get all the measures for *that* hospital. (There's one more bonus feature, can you find it...?)

Jaz said...

re: Maryland DC glitch, looks like we haven't closed a line there somewhere, I'll look into it, thanks Matt.

And yeh, it's a blog about transparency, I publish the flaws too :)

Jaz said...

Data collection period went in and out of the design like a yoyo. I'll think about where to put it back in. I agree, it's needed.

Jaz said...

"Maryland and D.C. are a little glitchy on the map."

I moved DC to the Atlantic, let me know if it works better now.

Disclosures and Disclaimers

Disclosures

My employer is compensated through funding to provide analytical research, technology solutions, and Web-based public and private health care performance reports by the State of New York, the State of Illinois, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Commonwealth Fund and Bridges to Excellence. I am not being compensated by any of these organisations to create articles for or make edits to this Web site or any other medium; and all posts authored by me are as an individual and do not represent my employer or the agencies I work for.