On Thursday, Illinois launched a new Web site that lets residents compare hospitals and surgery centers in the state, the Chicago Tribune reports.
The site aims to help consumers become better health care consumers and to hold health care providers accountable for their performance.
Legislation passed in 2003 called for the state to create the Hospital Report Card and Consumer Guide. However, the Illinois Department of Public Health's launch of the site was delayed because of funding, legal and regulatory issues.
The Web site includes information about:
- How much health care providers charge;
- How many procedures health providers perform;
- How often health care providers deliver recommended care; and
- How consumers rate health care providers' care.
Mary Driscoll -- division chief of patient safety and quality at the Illinois Department of Public Health -- said the state will add more information, such as the number of hospital-acquired infections for each facility, to the Web site over the next year.
Nineteen states have launched similar efforts to publicly report hospital care data (Graham, Chicago Tribune, 11/19).
Study Questions Effectiveness of Hospital Report Cards
Meanwhile, a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that online hospital report cards do not necessarily drive significant improvements in care quality, Reuters Health reports.
The study of 81 Canadian hospitals found that public report cards did not result in differences in hospitals' quality of care for heart attack and heart failure patients. However, the researchers did note that some hospitals made specific changes after the release of their report cards. For example, 25% of the hospitals studied altered their polices to allow emergency department physicians to give heart attack patients "clot-busting" drugs without having to wait for a consult.
"I don't think this study found any clear indication that report cards don't work," Jack Tu, lead researcher from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto, said, adding, "But it doesn't clearly show that they work really well, either. It's somewhere in between" (Norton, Reuters Health, 11/18).