EDITOR’S NOTE: This report has been corrected to reflect accurate statistics on patients being readmitted following hip and knee replacements at Olympic Medical Center and Jefferson Healthcare.
Curious how the care at your hospital stacks up against the competition?
The Washington State Hospital Association recently installed new data on WaHospitalQuality.org, a website that provides vast amounts of information on the performance of every hospital in the state.
Visitors to the website can compare hospitals to see which scores highest at infection control, patient satisfaction, C-section rates, emergency department wait times, heart attack and stroke response, and more.
Perhaps most importantly, said association president and CEO Scott Bond, the website is easy to use, and the information is understandable by everyone.
The idea, Bond said, is to make the process of choosing a hospital more “transparent.”
“That means, ‘How good is this care, really?’ And how much does it cost?” Bond said.
Scott Kennedy, chief physician officer at Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles, said transparency is key.
“It’s a powerful piece of what drives improvement,” he said.
That’s why, he said, officials at Olympic Medical Center support the “effort by the association to have much easier access to quality and safety information.”
“We’d love to be perfect all the time,” Kennedy said, “but the important thing is that the whole state is working on this together.”
He said the combined efforts of the past two years have resulted in the elimination of “more than 23,000 harm events” at hospitals across the state.
The website’s biggest contribution, Kennedy said, is providing “patients, the community and the clinical community with the ability to ask questions about what we’re doing to constantly improve care.”
The site gathers data on nearly 100 measures that hospitals report to state and federal agencies, and provides assistance in understanding what those measures mean.
Visitors can click on “Patient Satisfaction” and choose a hospital to find out what its patients say. Or click on “View Data Grid” and quickly compare the results of 99 hospitals, not just for “Overall Satisfaction,” but also for “Doctor Communications,” “Staff Responsiveness” and more.
Olympic Medical Center provides more data than Jefferson Healthcare in Port Townsend and Forks Community Hospital, the other two North Olympic Peninsula hospitals.
Forks provides the least.
Jim Chaney, acting CEO and CFO of the Forks hospital, said as a small, rural “critical access hospital” Forks Community is exempt from many of the reporting requirements that apply to larger hospitals. He added that the Forks hospital doesn’t offer many of the more sophisticated procedures that are covered in the data.
Many of the compiled results would be statistically unreliable anyway, Chaney said, because so few procedures are performed at the hospital.
“Our numbers are very small in comparison,” he said.
Brandie Manuel, director of patient safety and quality at Jefferson Healthcare, said the switch over to EPIC, a new medical record keeping system, resulted in the hospital’s inability to report its patient satisfaction statistics for the most recent reporting period.
Many of the hospital’s other performance statistics, however, are available at WaHospitalQuality.org.
Consumers who will soon require a hip or knee replacement can learn from the website that from July 2009 through June 2012, 4.3 percent (13 of 297) of those who had one of the procedures at Olympic Medical Center were later readmitted to the hospital, while 5.4 percent (8 of 144) were readmitted by Jefferson Healthcare.
A few more clicks reveals the University of Washington Medical Center has the worst record in that category of 88 hospitals in the state at 6 percent, while the best rate is shared by several hospitals at 4.1 percent.
The website also provides a plain English explanation of why each statistic is important, in this case noting, “Going back to the hospital within 30 days of getting out of the hospital can mean people aren’t getting the right care after they leave the hospital.”
The hospital association has a second website, WaHospitalPricing.org that provides data on how much each hospital charges for any one of dozens of procedures.
For example, the cost for the mother’s care for a Caesarian delivery without complications at Olympic Memorial Hospital is $11,087, with an average stay of 2.8 days.
At Jefferson Healthcare it’s $24,546, with an average stay of 3.2 days.
Mary Kay Clunies-Ross, a spokesperson for the Hospital Association, cautioned that the figures provided at WaHospitalPricing.org should be taken with a large grain of salt.
Because insurance companies are involved, what is charged and what is paid are often very different.
Clunies-Ross said the website may nevertheless be useful by providing hospital charges “when the insurance company is taken out of the mix.”
