Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
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Thursday, August 21, 2008

A way to judge your hospital

Hospital death rates for key conditions unveiled

Hospital Compare allows you to find out death rates for individual hospitals by condition.

They also let you compare things like patient satisfaction and number of medicare patients treated for various conditions. Ours, being a tertiary-care facility, isn't in their database, but I checked other primary care facilities in Lexington. St Joseph (the main one) seems to have the highest patient satisfaction; Central Baptist seems to have a higher percentage of meeting standards of care. UK lags behind in both, but I'm not surprised. I'm not impressed by what I've seen of the university's health care system. I have a friend who works there. He never sees the same doctor twice. Their health insurance means they go through UK HealthCare, and there seem to be an inordinate amount of hoops to jump sometimes. I like the choices I have with my insurance better.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As usual, medicare and those wishing to track the quality of others have created a poorly functional web site; if the work of those they wish to "track" were half as miserably bad as their own[medicares] performnce, we would ALL die!!
Good job medicare you're still managing to dysfunction approximately 100% of the time.

Hareega said...

I'm a physician and I can tell you these statistics can be very misleading. Pneumonia can be caused by several bacteria, viruses, fungi...etc

A staph pnumonia in a IV drug user or a PCP pneumonia in an HIV patient with almost no CD4 cells can be way more aggressive than a pneumonia in an otherwise healthy 30 year old. This applies to almost any infection anyone can get.

The same thing applies for heart attacks. I had plenty of patietns with heart attacks who looked extemely stable and some who died within 24 hours because the heart attcks damaged most of their heart muscle before they even arrived to the hospital. IT's very unfair to compare hospitals without considering these facts.

What hospitals will start doing is to work on improving their numbers by admitting healthy patients who will not die or suffer complications taking the beds of the more sick ones and prolonging the wait