Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Why Not The Second Best?

'Tis the season to work all night every night for a couple of weeks. The newly updated WhyNotTheBest.org went live this weekend, with a spiffy new look and four gajillion new rows of data.

Well, truth be told it's about six million rows. But it's still a lot. WhyNotTheBest is a Web property funded by the Commonwealth Fund that is geared toward health care providers and policy makers, the basic intent being to identify the top performers for a range of measures and allow anyone to compare (benchmark) themselves against these top performers.

The new design is thanks to Digital Wave who laboured over a very functional search engine that allows any user to add as many hospitals to a comparison list as they want.

The new site contains a bunch of new data, notably the readmission and mortality rates published by CMS for several conditions, and we included average Medicare reimbursements for the same conditions.

In addition we added a whole slew of new filters, so it is now possible to create groups of hospital by Dartmouth HRR (Hospital Referral Region), by ownership, by health system and a whole lot more.

As always the data drives the user to improvement tools and intervention material that will help improve quality of care for the measures being published.

Please go check it out and comment here if you have some feedback!
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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.