Washington , D.C. – The American Health Quality Association today urged consumers and hospital leaders to take advantage of individual hospital performance reports that will be posted on a new federal website, Hospital Compare (www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov), which goes live on Friday April 1, 2005 . The site will carry data on more than 4200 hospitals nationwide and will be updated quarterly.

“The site shows consumers how often their local hospitals are using procedures known to give patients the best chance of surviving and recovering from heart attacks, heart failure, pneumonia and other serious illnesses,” said David Schulke , Executive Vice President of the American Health Quality Association (AHQA), which represents the national network of health care Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs).

“This information about hospitals will save lives not only by encouraging consumers to be vigilant, but also because it will motivate hospital boards and executives to engage more extensively in the quality improvement activities of their staff and physicians,” Schulke said.

Site Could Spark Hospital Improvement

The new Hospital Compare website shows that hospitals vary tremendously from one to another in their performance. It also shows that the quality of care varies a great deal within the walls of a single hospital. For example, a hospital may provide excellent care for pneumonia patients, but fall far short of the best care for heart attack patients.

Schulke noted, “When hospitals advertise to consumers, they market the whole institution, but there is nothing about working under the same roof that ensures that physicians and clinical teams will work together effectively. A primary determinant of hospital quality is how well teams of health care professionals communicate and support each other every day in each clinical service. Hospital management can improve quality for their entire institutions by making the variation of quality performance in distinct clinical areas the top agenda item in every board meeting, and by supporting efforts by clinical teams to work together more effectively on the front lines of care.”

The Hospital Compare website results from collaboration between the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services ( CMS) and the Hospital Quality Alliance, involving the American Hospital Association, the Federation of American Hospitals and the American Association of Medical Colleges. Hospital data for the site is reported voluntarily to CMS.

A major goal of the site is to allow hospital board members and senior executives to see how their hospitals stack up against other local institutions and national averages. “Hospital Compare will show hospital leaders where they need to improve,” Schulke said. “Hospitals want to do the best for their patients. We hope that publishing this information will motivate them to invest more in working with doctors, pharmacists and nurses to improve the quality of care.”

Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) Offer Federally-Funded Assistance

The quality measures reported on Hospital Compare currently reflect hospital efforts to deliver effective care for heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia. The site is expected to soon add information on hospital performance in other clinical areas where use of best practices has a critical impact on patient safety, such as procedures that can be successfully used to avoid surgical infections.

Under contract to Medicare, QIOs have been working with hospitals around the country in these clinical areas for more than a decade, providing onsite training in the implementation of best practices. In an effort to teach hospital staff how to monitor their own quality, over the past two years QIOs have also been helping hospitals abstract, submit and validate data on these measures.

“As hospitals make a commitment to use performance data to drive quality improvement programs, there is a QIO in every state ready to assist. This is a service paid for by Medicare to improve quality and reduce costly errors that harm the elderly and disabled, and we encourage hospitals to take advantage of it.” Schulke said.

On the AHQA website at www.ahqa.org, hospitals can find contact information for local QIOs as well as identify hundreds of hospitals working with QIOs to implement best practices in all clinical areas reported on Hospital Compare.

Quality measures on Hospital Compare for heart attacks, for example, show the percentage of patients at each hospital given aspirin at arrival, aspirin at discharge, beta blockers at arrival, beta blockers at discharge, and ACE inhibitors for left ventricular systolic dysfunction. Patients who should not receive aspirin or these other drugs are not included in the calculation of the hospital’s quality performance in providing treatment.

Examples of QIO success working with hospitals to improve heart attack care are listed below.

Sparks Regional Medical Center , working with the Arkansas QIO, the Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care, increased use of beta-blockers at admission to treat heart attacks from 56% in January 2002 to 92% in February 2003. Beta-blockers given at discharge increased from 53% to 91% in the same period.

Saint Ma ry’s Regional Medical Center in Reno worked with HealthInsight, the Nevada QIO, to raise aspirin at arrival from 89% to 100%; aspirin at discharge from 89% to 99%; and beta blocker at arrival from 64% to 98%.

Berkshire Medical Center worked with Ma ssPRO, the Ma ssachusetts QIO to increasing aspirin at discharge for cardiac patients from 96% to 100%; smoking cessation counseling from 43% to 100%; ACE-inhibitor use from 67% to 88%; and referral to cardiac rehabilitation from 14% to 98%.

Working with MPRO, the Michigan QIO, the University of Michigan Medical Center increased aspirin on admission for heart attack from 88.98% to 100%, beta-blockers on admission from 75% to 100, and aspirin at discharge from 85.7% to 100%.

For More Information: www.ahqa.org

The American Health Quality Association is dedicated to improving the safety and effectiveness of health care. AHQA represents the national network of Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) that work with hospitals, medical practices, health plans, long-term care facilities, home health agencies, and employers to encourage the spread of best clinical practices and improve systems of care delivery.