People can understand letter grades – A through F. As consumers see more hospital ‘report cards,’ reporters can explain their limitations This entry was posted in Health data, Health journalism, Hospitals and tagged hospital compare, ornstein, Public records on Septemby Andrew Van Dam. But now that it is public, we as journalists have an obligation to make it relevant.” “For decades, hospitals fought to keep this information out of the public domain. “More reporters are realizing the treasure trove of information they can find,” he says. The AHCJ is beefing up efforts to educate reporters on how to find and interpret quality statistics about healthcare providers, where to see inspection reports, and how to compare patient experience, readmission, and mortality rates. That, of course, is where health journalists come in.Ĭharles Ornstein, president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and an investigative healthcare reporter with ProPublica, says hospital executives should get used to heightened attention. “But what we’ve learned is that the organization must ask a critical question: Could this data be right?” It’s sort of like a pigeon in a shooting game. Or, if there’s data that says, for example, your coronary artery bypass graft profile is horrible, historically what hospitals have done is to discredit the data. (James) Conway says that whatever they do, hospitals should not do what they used to when negative stories arose, “which was lay low, hope it vanishes, and take a ‘this too shall pass’ attitude. In HealthLeaders magazine, a publication that targets “healthcare executives and senior decision-makers,” Cheryl Clark writes that the recent explosion of publicly available health care quality data may force hospitals to change the way they approach unflattering numbers.Įncouragingly, Clark quotes officials who have found that the only way to deal with all these new numbers is not to ignore or discredit them, a tempting option that has often been the default in the past, but instead to release even more data, and to better educate the public about the numbers that are out there. Hospitals learning not to fear public data This entry was posted in Health data, Health journalism, Hospitals, Public records and tagged data, hospital compare, Hospitals, patient satisfaction on Novemby Andrew Van Dam. For more on how to use this and other tools to evaluate local hospitals, see AHCJ’s Hospital Compare resources.Īndrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism. So, with just a few clicks, Ott, who posted the Hospital Compare charts directly into her story, brought important context to a contentious local issue. As it happens, Cooper Green has, in recent years, lagged behind the hospitals to which its patients would likely be diverted. When WBHM’s Tanya Ott heard talk of patient satisfaction ratings, she took the simple step of firing up Hospital Compare and seeing how Cooper Green stacked up against local competitors. Hospital Compare helps reporter fact check claimsĪfter the local county commission voted to close Birmingham’s Cooper Green Mercy Hospital and replace it with a hub-and-spoke system of distributed care, protesters began to rally around the institution, claiming that its closure would hit poor residents hard, and that the hospital had earned some of the highest patient satisfaction numbers in the nation. He welcomes questions and suggestions and tip sheets at entry was posted in Health data, Hospitals, Insurance, Patient safety and tagged hospital compare, Hospitals, rating on Augby Joseph Burns. Joseph Burns ( an independent journalist who resides in Brewster, Massachusetts, is AHCJ’s topic leader on health reform. Now researchers at the Rand Corporation have built a tool called the Personalized Hospital Performance Report Card that allows users to review, customize, and compare hospitals across the United States and develop their own custom ratings based on their most important performance areas. For those seeking to analyze hospitals’ overall scores, the site is useful but its one-size-fits-all approach limits how much patients can design searches to match their individual needs. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched the Hospital Compare website to let consumers evaluate hospital performance based on a star-rating system.
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