Audio clip
Herb Kuhn
WASHINGTON — No longer limited to asking friends and neighbors for tips, hospitalgoers now have a new way to predict how likely it is their hospital bathroom will be clean, whether staff nurses and doctors will communicate clearly and other details about their stay.
Survey results about patient experiences at more than 2,500 hospitals nationwide, including Erlanger hospital and Parkridge Medical Center in Chattanooga, now are accessible on a Web site created by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, called Hospital Compare.
“It’s a good first effort,” said Jim Brexler, president and chief executive officer of Erlanger. “I think we’re going to learn more as to what it would take to refine and improve this data set, not the least of which would be to have larger sample sets to be taken.”
The survey data on the site in some cases were drawn from only 100 or so responses, said Herb Kuhn, deputy administrator at CMS, but he is planning that hospitals on the site eventually will submit at least 300 patient surveys per year, he said in a news briefing Friday.
Federal officials are promoting this component of the site as another step toward encouraging hospital quality and efficiency by giving consumers real data to inform their medical decisions.
Mr. Kuhn said this kind of public accountability will push hospitals to improve services.
On the Hospital Compare site, Web users can view results of 10 quality measures of patient satisfaction, drawn from responses to a 27-question survey. Hospitals distributed the surveys at random to patients 18 and older shortly after an overnight hospital stay.
Erlanger and Parkridge’s scores generally were within a few percentage points of the state and national scores, according to data tables generated by the Hospital Compare Web site.
Data included on the site was voluntarily reported by hospitals participating during the nine month period ending in June 2007, federal officials said Friday.
Memorial Hospital’s data is unavailable; the hospital only began submitting information on July 1, 2007, to coincide with its fiscal year, and so the hospital’s survey data will not be accessible on the site until spring 2009, said Roy Crowley, director of service excellence at Memorial.
Medicare data on the costs and volume of usage for various procedures also is available on the site, Mr. Kuhn said.
All three local hospitals, and many nationally, have been doing internal patient satisfaction surveys for years as a means to improve their own performance, but this site is the first national, standardized data set on patient perspectives on the care they receive, hospital officials said.
“It’s an excellent source, but it’s not the only source that consumers should use,” said Jerri Underwood, market chief nurse executive at Parkridge, adding that patients also should consult their doctors, friends and family before choosing a hospital.
Mr. Brexler noted that response data for three of Erlanger’s campuses — Erlanger’s downtown Baroness campus, Erlanger East and Erlanger North — are combined in the data set on the national site, making the data less helpful for those looking to differentiate among the three campuses and also making it nearly impossible for hospital administrators to use the data to make specific improvements.
The Tennessee Hospital Association supports “transparency” efforts such as the Hospital Compare site, said Chris Clarke, senior vice president for clinical and professional services for the THA.
But she noted that the percentages used in graphs generated by the site may be confusing if users do not read the fine print.
For instance, a score of 75 percent for the question, “How often did nurses communicate well with patients?” is not an average rating; it means that 75 percent of respondents said their nurse “always” communicated well and does not include those who responded “usually,” she said.
In announcing the site’s launch on Friday, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt acknowledged the limits to the data that are available and said the site will become more “robust” in the future.
“We’re still learning. This is a first iteration,” he said.
Health care reporter Emily Bregel has worked at the Chattanooga Times Free Press since July 2006. She previously covered banking and wrote for the Life section. Emily, a native of Baltimore, Md., earned a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Columbia University. She received a first-place award for feature writing from the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists’ Golden Press Card Contest for a 2009 article about a boy with a congenital heart defect. She ...
