First, the good news.
There are scores of online ways – courtesy of government agencies, nonprofits and ratings Web sites – that patients can find out about the quality of medical care they are likely to receive at hospitals.
Now, the bad news.
This surfeit of choice can be not only hard for the average person to navigate and understand, but also can be subjective when defining what qualifies as good care.
To wit:
• At a Web site called www.consumerreportshealth.org, 15 Sacramento-area hospitals are ranked by the aggressiveness of their care – meaning the amount of time and money spent on patients.
In this case, conservative treatment (shorter hospital stays, smaller price tag) is deemed better. But don't bother looking up Kaiser Permanente hospitals. They aren't included.
• At www.calhospital compare.org, rankings compiled by the California HealthCare Foundation statistics are broken down in categories ranging from intensive-care unit mortality rates to appropriate use of antibiotics.
An overall patient rating of the hospital is included, but there are no data about some specific conditions, most notably oncology.
• At www.leapfroggroup.org, a consortium of major health-care buyers (companies such as General Motors), hospital ratings are broken down into "high risk treatments," such as coronary bypass surgery and pancreatic resection results. But Leapfrog depends on the accuracy of data provided by hospitals.
• At federal government-run www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, users can see specific information, when available, for conditions and treatments ranging from heart bypass to pulmonary care.
But much of the information is not available. For instance: None of the Sacramento-area hospitals made data available on the outcome of heart-bypass care.
Still, patient advocates say there is considerably more information available today than in the pre-Internet era. Whether people are using the resources available to them is another matter.
A Harris Interactive poll, released in May, showed that 23 percent of patients looked up hospital ratings in 2007, the same percentage as in the 2004 survey.
"We were hoping to see the numbers increase, so we're a little disappointed," says Maribeth Shannon, director of the market and policy program for the California HealthCare Foundation. "Only 10 percent of people in California are hospitalized in any given year. If people know these sites are there when they need them, then maybe these sites are OK."
Shannon says hospital ratings sites, including the one at her organization (www.calhospitalcompare.org) have too many missing components.
"There's a great variation within a hospital," she says. "Consumers would like us to give a blanket, overall rating for a hospital, but the best we can do is objective, sound measures of a specific condition. There are a lot of services we don't have data for yet."
Among those is cancer treatment and care for orthopedic conditions.
"You look at a knee replacement or hip replacement," she says. "Those are very shoppable procedures for a patient. They'd have time to research it. But (the information) is not out there yet."
Call The Bee's Sam McManis, (916) 321-1145.
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