Hospital Ratings on Patient Experience

Yesterday I came across Business Over Broadway's really cool Map of US Hospitals and Their Patient Experience Ratings.  It is a wonderful graphic display of results for HCAHPS data collected Q3 2010 to Q2 2011 for over 3000 US hospitals on ten measures of patient perspectives of care (updated 5/30/2012).  

I think there are a couple of key points about this data.

1. Hospital leaders and providers need to recognize that anyone can access this data and present it in ways that are easily understood by consumers. This means it is hard to hide.
2. Today's interactive and dynamic tools for displaying data make it such a more pleasant experience for those of us who have long relied upon data for strategy, planning and performance improvement. 

Code:

The colors for each hospital are based on their PAI (red = 0 – 20; purple = 21-40; yellow = 41-60; blue = 61-80; green = 81-100). If you click on one of the buttons, you will see detailed information about the patient experience metrics (if survey data were collected for that hospital) as well as response rates, sample sizes and other notes (if available). NOTE: Some hospitals do not have any ratings (those are typically red).

Comments

[Bogdan]

Medicare/Medicaid are publishing hospital ratings, freely available on data.gov. Interestingly enough, I wrote a post on US top 5 worst hospitals recently using a dataset from data.gov. The information is out there...sadly most consumers don't know where it is and most times it's not presented in an easy-to-understand fashion.

For reference, my post: http://bogdanrau.com/blog/top-5-worst-hospitals

[thielst]

Wow!Most would look at which hospitals are rating the best. It certainly is interesting to look at those with the worst ratings.

Unfortunately, some of those hospitals are familiar. Thanks for sharing, Bogdan.

[Bogdan]

Sadly, some are familiar to me as well. One would hope that their admins are using the data they report on to make improvements. There was a TED talk about how a simple checklist in the OR made outstanding changes in patient safety.....its the little things. It will be interesting to see what the differences are next year compared to this year.