The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Hospital Quality Alliance, and hospitals across the nation are working together to create and publicly report hospital quality information. This information measures how well hospitals care for their patients, regardless of whether the care was paid for by Medicare, Medicaid, or a private health insurance plan.
The hospital quality scores on this website tell how well hospitals are doing at providing recommended care for patients with certain common conditions. Research has shown that these treatments provide the best results for most patients with those conditions and are an important part of the patients' overall care.
You should know, however, that a hospital's quality is more than just its scores on these measures. Hospitals provide care for other illnesses and conditions for which measures are still under development. A hospital should be able to tell you what steps it is taking to improve its care. The information you will find on this website is intended to help you when you talk with your physician or hospital about how you can get the care you need.
Clinical quality facts are collected from hospitals’ patient records. The data is converted to rates that measure how well the hospitals care for their patients. This is done by seeing how often the hospital follows procedures known to result in better outcomes for patients.
HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) is a national, standardized survey of hospital patients. HCAHPS (pronounced "H-caps") was created to publicly report the patient's perspective of hospital care. The survey asks a random sample of recently discharged patients about important aspects of their hospital experience.
HCAHPS was developed by a partnership of public and private organizations. Development of the survey was funded by the Federal government, specifically the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
For more on HCAHPS information, please see Information for Professionals on this website, or visit the official HCAHPS website: www.hcahpsonline.org.
In addition to reporting performance for each individual measure, Partner for Quality Care presents summary performance scores for each hospital for each of the four conditions. Specifically, it includes the following summary measures:
To create summary scores for each condition, Partner for Quality Care uses a methodology prescribed by the Joint Commission. This approach suggests that the summary score be the number of times a hospital performed the appropriate action across all measures for that condition, divided by the number of opportunities the hospital had to provide appropriate care for that condition. Summary scores were not calculated if a hospital did not report on all the measures for each condition (all 24 measures for the overall score) and did not have at least 20 patients for at least one of the measures for each condition. Scores are not weighted, except that measures with larger denominators do contribute more weight to the calculation of the mean for that measure. None of the measures is risk adjusted.
The score received in the Patient Experience measurement area Overall Rating of Hospital is used as the summary score for Patient Experience.
1 The number of patients is too small (<20) to be sure how well this hospital is performing
The scores on the Partner for Quality Care site are based on data
collected from the January 2010 to December 2010.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is projected to release new data four times a year (April, June, September and December). Partner for Quality Care calculates new summary scores for Oregon hospitals and the national top 10% benchmark based on the updates. Then this website is updated with all new quality scores.