Health officials made a bold comparison of U.S. hospitals

A survey conducted by U.S health authorities on the survival rates of patients admitted with heart problems in country’s various hospitals, was published for the first time in two decades on the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Web site this Thursday.

The mortality data report released by the Department of Health and Human Services, rated 4700 hospitals across the nation according to the quality of care they provided and found that most of them cohered to the national average standards of quality while some fell below and above average. The comparison was done on the basis of 31 elective hospital procedures such as heart valve operations, gallbladder removal and hernia operations.

"The steps we are taking today mean that patients will have the information they need to make decisions about their own care," Mike Leavitt, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in a teleconference.

The report posted on the federal website, www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov , includes a year long study (July 2005 to June 2006) of death rates for heart attack and heart failure patients admitted in hospitals who couldn’t prolong their survival for more than 30 days.

The website publicly provides information on how well the hospitals care for all their adult patients with certain medical conditions. It enables a person to locate for various hospitals across the U.S. by name, proximity and geography. It also informs people about the rights a person has in a hospital, hospital locations and complete addresses along with the mortality rates and detailed care procedures. The punch line reads, “Leading America to Better Health, Safety and Well-Being.“

The survey was conducted in wake of bringing transparency in the Medicare industry as a lot of questions have already been raised on the quality of services provided as well as the price of products and services.

Leavitt mentioned that the very reason for this first ever publication of such a kind was to provide the public with information about quality of care provided by various hospitals who charge for their services but do not deliver results.

Herb Kuhn, acting deputy administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services revealed the categories under which the hospitals were rated as, above average, average or below average. Among the hospitals surveyed, 7 were rated as below average for death rates following a heart attack and 17 were rated above average.

In heart failure, 38 of them were above average and 35 fell below average care standards according to researchers, including those from Harvard and Yale Universities.

Kuhn also mentioned that the local Quality Improvement Organizations (QIO’s) have also been assigned to help the below average hospitals increase their quality standards.

Publishing of such data was done previously in 1980’s but was highly criticized as unfair and was scrapped under Clinton’s Presidential Rule.

The United States Department of Health and Human Services, also known as DHHS or HHS, is the principal agency for providing essential health services and administering health programs.