Sometimes, government can get it right.

If you were in need of hospital-based diabetes care and needed to choose a hospital in your area, how would you choose? Especially if there are a dozen choices close to your home?

The U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services has a Web-based service called Hospital Compare. It is a database of questionnaire responses based on Medicare patient experiences, comprising scorecards on medical centers across the U.S. You can compare aggregate patient responses covering basic diagnostic categories of adult diabetes, heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, chest pain and chronic lung disease. You can get data in chart or graph form, and can compare hospital results side by side for any group of hospitals you choose.

I chose three hospitals in my area to see what resulted. The numbers, in general, were not miles apart, but there were several care categories in which one hospital might be 9 or 10 points higher or lower than its peer hospitals. That could make a difference in decision making.

My only question is, how come we can't assemble this data for all patient experiences, not just Medicare patients?

Anyway, kudos to the feds for building this valuable information source. As health care reform moves forward (hopefully) we'll need more of this actionable data.