Fact Sheets

CMS RELEASES NEW INFORMATION TO HELP CONSUMERS COMPARE CARE AT AMERICA'S HOSPITALS

Overview

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has expanded the amount of information available on its Hospital Compare Web site at http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov to assist beneficiaries and their caregivers in making better choices about their health care.

In August 2011, CMS updated Hospital Compare with more recent information on the 30-day mortality and readmissions rates for patients admitted to many inpatient hospitals for heart failure, acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), and pneumonia. The website also includes refreshed information on outpatient measures, including measures that show whether outpatients who are treated for suspected heart attacks receive proven therapies that reduce mortality (such as an aspirin at arrival), are protected from surgical-site infections, and receive safe and efficient imaging services.

This information is shared with consumers and providers to help improve the quality and transparency of care by giving the American public and healthcare professionals better access to important hospital data.   Hospital Compare provides information not only about inpatient readmissions and mortality data and outpatient measures; it also includes inpatient clinical process and patient satisfaction measures. This suite of measures promotes increased scrutiny by hospitals of patient outcomes in the service of providing safe and effective care for every patient, every time.

Updated Outcomes Data on Hospital Compare

CMS has been reporting information about the quality of care available at America ’s hospitals for several years.  Before 2007, this information was limited to inpatient “process of care measures,” which demonstrate how well hospitals follow generally recognized protocols believed to result in the best inpatient outcomes.  However, these “process of care measures” failed to capture how well patients fared as a result of these care protocols or the quality of care provided to patients in outpatient settings, such as emergency departments or outpatient surgery centers.

In 2007, CMS began reporting 30-day mortality rates for inpatient hospital stays related to heart attack and heart failure.  CMS added 30-day mortality rates for pneumonia-related stays in 2008.  Mortality rate measures are “outcome” measures because they give an indication of how the patient fared after the inpatient hospital stay. The rates themselves are indicators of how many patients would likely die within 30 days of discharge from the hospital (after having been

admitted for heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia), and are “risk adjusted” to account for extraneous influences, such as the difference among hospitals in the degree of their patients’ illnesses.   In 2009, CMS debuted a new set of measures on Hospital Compare that showed 30-day all-cause readmissions for patients who had been admitted to the hospital for heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia.  

To help consumers use outcomes data more effectively, CMS placed each hospital into one of three categories, based on their mortality or readmissions rates: “Better than U.S. National Rate,” “No Different than U.S. National Rate,” or “Worse than U.S. National Rate.”  The distribution of hospitals into each of these three categories is shown in Table 1, below.

Table 1. Outcome Measure Results for August 2011 Reporting

(July 2007-June 2010 Discharges)