If you go to a hospital with a heart attack, will you be given aspirin?
When you leave the hospital after heart failure, will you receive discharge instructions?
Consumers can find answers to these and other questions about the quality of care at Olympic Medical Center, Jefferson Healthcare hospital and most other hospitals in the nation on a new federal Web site.
Hospital Compare shows data on 17 measures for three common medical conditions — heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia — and lets consumers gauge one hospital against another.
The current data can be viewed online at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.
Administrators at Jefferson Healthcare and Olympic Medical say the Web site is a good first step to letting the public take a look at their data, and anticipate seeing more extensive figures in the future.
“It’s a good place for us to start asking questions,” said Terri Camp, associate administer of quality and compliance at Jefferson Healthcare.
The site, which debuted April 1, displays graphs about a hospital and compares how it measures up to the state and national averages in their use of “best practices.”
It is run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as a step in encouraging hospitals to improve their service.
98 percent of hospitals
About 98 percent of hospitals in the United States supplied data on 10 evidence-based best practices.
One of those that’s not included is Forks Community Hospital.
Olympic Medical Center was one of the hospitals that first volunteered for the initiative about one to 1½ years ago, said Dr. Scott Kennedy, chief medical officer.
Reporting is voluntary but in most cases is tied to Medicare money the hospitals won’t get if they don’t report.
“It’s new to compare hospital against hospital, and that’s been an area of trepidation for many hospitals,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy agrees with hospitals’ practices being transparent to the public but said the data listed on the Web site do require interpretation.
For example, a graph measuring the percent of heart attack patients given an ACE inhibitor for a weak heart shows 75 percent as the average for all reporting hospitals and 76 percent as the average for hospitals in Washington state — but does not show a percentage for Olympic.
Instead it adds a note of caution about drawing conclusions on the hospital’s data.
A click on a corresponding link shows two out of two patients at Olympic, or 100 percent, were given the an ACE inhibitor.
Joyce Cardinal, Olympic’s chief operating officer and chief nursing operator, said the hospital sees more fluctuation in its data because it is a smaller facility.
That can mean the hospital earns a low score because it gave aspirin to one of only two patients discharged.
“For larger hospitals where they have a lot higher numbers, it is probably more of a reflection,” Cardinal said.
The site is “one component of what hospitals do as far as quality improvement,” she said.
