CMS Launches Quality Care Finder, Enhances Data to Compare Nursing Homes

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a new tool to help consumers make informed choices about their health care and to improve the quality of care in America’s hospitals, nursing homes, physician offices, and other health care settings.

The new Quality Care Finder tool allows consumers to compare information on hospitals, nursing homes and plans.

“These tools are new ways CMS is making sure consumers have information about health care quality and important information they need to make the best decisions about where to receive high-quality care,” said Dr. Don Berwick, CMS administrator. “These efforts are designed to also encourage providers to deliver safe, patient-centered care that consumers can rely on and will motivate improvement across our health care system.”

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CMS has also updated data for outcomes of inpatient hospital care on Hospital Compare.  The site now includes new 30-day mortality rates and 30-day readmissions rates for inpatients admitted with heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia. The rates encompass three full years of claims data (from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2010).

“Both sets of inpatient measures are risk-adjusted, taking health conditions into account to ‘level the playing field’ among hospitals and to help ensure accuracy in performance reporting,” Berwick said.

Hospital Compare also includes 10 measures that capture patient experience with hospital care. After two years of reporting these patient experience measures, hospitals have shown modest but meaningful improvement on most experience measures. The degree of this improvement has been relatively uniform across most measures and hospitals.

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For more information, view the website.