CMS Hospital Compare Ratings

What is Hospital Compare?

Hospital Compare was created through the efforts of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in order to help you make decisions about where you get your healthcare. Hospital Compare has information about the quality of care at over 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals across the country. By publicly displaying each hospital's quality data, it also encourages hospitals to improve the quality of care they provide. At SOMC, we are proud of the quality that we provide to our community, and we encourage you to examine our quality results and compare us to our competitors when making decisions about your healthcare needs.

What information is available on Hospital Compare?

Hospital Compare offers a "snapshot" of quality for hospitals in your area on the following aspects of healthcare:

• Timely and Effective Care: How often and how quickly each hospital gives recommended treatments for certain conditions like heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, children's asthma, and for surgical patients
• Readmissions, Complications and Deaths:
  • How each hospital's rates of readmission and 30-day mortality (death) rates for certain conditions compare with the national rate.
  • How likely it is that patients will suffer from complications while in the hospital.
  • How often patients got certain serious conditions while in the hospital, that might have been prevented if the hospital followed procedures based on best practices and scientific evidence.
• Use of Medical Imaging: How a hospital uses outpatient medical imaging tests (like CT scans and MRIs).
• Survey of Patients' Experiences: How recently-discharged patients responded to a national survey about their hospital experience. For example, how well their hospital's doctors and nurses communicate with patients and how well they manage their patients' pain.
• Number of Medicare Patients: How many people with Medicare have had certain procedures or have been treated for certain conditions at each hospital.
• Medicare Payment: Information about how much Medicare pays hospitals.

How do I navigate the Hospital Compare website?

http://hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/ -From the Hospital Compare home page, you will be able to perform a search by location (using Zip code or City, State). This will give you a list of facilities within 50 miles of the zip code or city that you entered. Optionally, you may also include a specific hospital name if you would like to look at the quality results of a specific hospital that you have in mind. Once the search is resulted, you may modify your results by increasing your search area beyond 50 miles or search by state or county.

Each facility's name, distance from your area, hospital type, and availability of emergency services will be displayed. You may select a hospital's name to target that specific hospital or you can check the box next to two or more hospitals that you would like to compare. If you check two or more facilities' boxes, select the "Compare Now" button at the top or bottom of the page. This will bring up the before mentioned aspects of healthcare represented as tabs at the top of the page. Each tab will have quality measures with the selected facilities' results listed side by side for you to directly compare.

If you select "View Graphs," bar graphs demonstrating the comparative results will be displayed. Additionally, state and national averages will also be displayed next to the facilities' results for each indicator. Lastly, there is another option to "View Details" which will allow you to view the same information via tables if that is your preference.

Hospital Compare Results

• Patient Survey Results 
• Timely & Effective Care 
• Readmissions, Complications, & Deaths 
• Use of Medical Imaging 
• Medicare Payments 

The Hospital Compare site was last updated on July 19, 2012 and is updated on a quarterly basis. SOMC updates this section quarterly as new data becomes available.