U.S Rates Hospital Heart Care Online

A new initiative by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is now ranking all American hospitals and posting the results of treatments for heart failure and heart attacks. The move is a natural one in the increasingly high-tech world of medicine. Currently, results are available for more than 4700 different institutions.

Not only does the study allow patients of various hospitals to see how theirs stacks up against the competition, it also allows researchers previously unattainable access to medical statistics broken down both by region and specific hospitals. Think of it as Consumer Reports for the cardiac arrest set.

A link to the study is available right here. A recent post in The Cardio Blog also mentioned that the group responsible for conducting the study have also offered help to institutions ranked poorly on the study. They also quote Michael Leavitt, secretary of the U.S DHHS, saying that the move is a natural step “because for most of its history, Medicare has been paying for services, but not paying for results.”

Reuters News Agency released some further information about the study and detailed some of the actual results of the study. According to Reuters, “just seven hospitals were rated worse-than-average for death rates following a heart attack, while 17 were rated better-than- average,” while, “In heart failure, 38 hospitals scored a top rating, while 35 scored a worse-than-average for that measure.”

The study also details results for over 30 different elective hospital procedures. Not only is this a big step in giving people more information with which to educate themselves on the quality of service at their regional medical facilities, but it will also provide some tremendously interesting data once it is aggregated and analyzed over the course of several years.

Will giving consumers more access to healthcare information result in better healthcare itself? Only time will tell.