We can review Medicare hospital comparison reports that rate how well hospitals follow evidence-based guidelines for treating patients, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently added reports based on patient surveys.
But soon, the Wall Street Journal recently reported, we’ll be able to compare hospitals by the intensity of care patients receive — is it aggressive or conservative?
The nonprofit Consumers Union, publishers of Consumer Reports magazine, is launching the new hospital-ratings service, which will rate 3,000 hospitals around the U.S.:
Consumers will be able to see a graph showing how intensely each hospital tends to treat patients, on a scale from zero for the most conservative to 100 for the most aggressive. Intensity of care is based on time spent in the hospital and the number of doctor visits. The index reflects the hospital’s handling of nine serious conditions, including cancer and heart failure, when it treats patients in the last two years of life.
What will patients do with the information? While we all applaud more transparency in the health care system, the story points out that Dartmouth research has shown that more intense care doesn’t necessarily correlate with better results.
When it comes to health care solutions, we need to swim forward, not paddle furiously in one place.