See how hospitals rate, on Hospital Compare

1 comment June 2nd, 2008

Want to see what patients have said about their satisfaction with a particular hospital, or how the hospital compares with others when it comes to recommended care and outcomes?

On the Web site “Hospital Compare” you can see that information for most hospitals across the country and here in the Rock River Valley.

The Web site was created by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, together with the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA), a public-private collaboration that promotes reporting on hospital quality of care.  The patient satisfaction and outcome data on Hospital Compare includes all patients, not just those on Medicare and Medicaid. 

To find data on hospitals, click on the main Hospital Care link, then on the “Find and Compare Hospitals” bar, and then on the “Begin Search” bar under the “General Search” heading. 

On the next page you can search by hospital name, zip code, city, state or county. That’s where I chose to view hospitals within 25 miles of Rockford. Five are listed: Rockford Memorial Hospital, SwedishAmerican Hospital, OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center, Beloit Memorial Hospital and Rochelle Community Hospital. All five provided process of care and outcome measures. For Rockford Memorial and Beloit Memorial, patient satisfaction ratings were not available. 

The data on the above links is for the most recent survey, from July 2006 through June 2007. For archived information from earlier dates, click here.

I was alerted to this site by the quarterly Information Service Letter, a publication of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Rockford.