How are our hospitals measuring up? “Hospital Compare”: a resource for hospital quality of care.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers the Medicare program, publishes information on the Internet about the quality of hospital care for many conditions, including heart attacks and heart failure. The quality measures for cardiac disease include information about how often eligible patients are treated with certain medications, how often smokers are counseled to quit, how often hospitals provide rapid treatment to restore blood flow in the heart arteries for patients who need that therapy quickly, and how often an indicated test to measure heart function is done for patients with heart failure. All of these measures assess care that is strongly recommended by experts. The measures include only those patients who should receive this care and, ideally, performance on these measures should be very high. The results are provided in terms of percentages, ie, how many people out of a hundred are treated according to what is recommended. For example, aspirin is recommended for all patients admitted with a heart attack, and one measure determines the percent of patients in the selected hospital who were treated with aspirin. With the attention given to these measures, the rates have improved for all of them over the last several years. (September 23, 2008)