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!‎