The Department of Health and Human Services has launched the first national print advertising campaign focused on the quality of care available in hospitals.
The ads, placed by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the May 21 edition of 58 major daily newspapers, promote Hospital Compare, an easy-to-use Web site that helps consumers "make well-informed decisions when choosing a hospital." The site includes has information on nearly 4,000 hospitals.
The ads also provide scores from two of the 26 quality and patient satisfaction measures on the Web site for a sample of hospitals in the newspapers' circulation areas. The 26 quality measures enable patients to better understand 10 key aspects of the patient experience, CMS said.
"The newspaper ads are designed to raise awareness about the important information on Hospital Compare," said CMS Acting Administrator Kerry Weems. "Patients and their family members can use this information to see how well their hospitals are providing care, and hospitals can use the data to focus on areas where there is opportunity to improve the quality of care."
According to HHS, the newspaper ad, aimed at reaching areas covered by about 1,000 of the hospitals, invites readers to "Compare the Quality of Your Local Hospitals" and contains the following information:
- The percentage of patients at each hospital who always received help when they requested it, as reported by the patients themselves.
- The percentage of patients at each hospital who were given antibiotics one hour prior to surgery, as reported by hospitals.
- The state average for each of these two measures.
There are 26 quality-of-care measures on Hospital Compare that can be used to compare hospitals with each other or to state and national benchmarks. In addition, there's information about the care provided to patients with heart failure and heart attack. The newest enhancement to Hospital Compare is the inclusion of 10 patient experience-of-care topics that enable consumers to get a better picture of the quality of care delivered at their local hospitals.
The patient experience-of-care information available on Hospital Compare is collected through a patient survey entitled the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, or HCAHPS. HCAHPS is the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients' perspectives of care.
Survey results reported on Hospital Compare cover 10 key aspects of the patient experience, including how often doctors and nurses communicated well with patients, how often patients received help quickly - one of the features in the newspaper ads - and patients' overall rating of the hospital.
HHS officials hope the ads, and the information available at Hospital Compare, will encourage hospitals to improve the care they provide to patients.
Have you seen these ads? Is your practice included on the Web site? E-mail chelsey.ledue@medtechpublishing.com with your stories and comments.