Commonwealth Fund Introduces New Hospital Comparison Tool - October 19, 2010

Last week, the Commonwealth Fund announced a new resource for health care professionals interested in tracking performance on various measures of health care quality. The website, WhyNotTheBest.org, includes measures of hospital quality that are publicly reported on the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) website, Hospital Compare. While the underlying data is not new, the Commonwealth Fund calculates composite scores for each condition — i.e., heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia and surgical care improvement — using the Joint Commission’s methodology. The composite scores are not weighted or risk adjusted. It remains to be seen which methodology CMS will adopt when the agency unveils its value-based purchasing program in the coming months. The website also allows users to segregate hospitals by a variety of hospital types, including academic medical centers and “safety net hospitals.” Although the definition includes members of NAPH and/or hospitals serving 30 percent or more Medicaid patients, a scan of the 500 or so hospitals listed as “safety net hospitals” shows that many rural hospitals and psychiatric-only hospitals are included.