The nonprofit Consumers Union is launching a new hospital-ratings service, which will include around 3,000 facilities. Consumers will be able to see a graph showing how intensely each hospital tends to treat patients, on a scale from zero for the most conservative to 100 for the most aggressive. Intensity of care is based on time spent in the hospital and the number of doctor visits, and the index reflects the hospital's handling of nine serious conditions.
Only one in eight cardiac arrest patients transported by Washington, DC, ambulances make it to an emergency room with a pulse, while in nearby communities the rate is twice as high. Officials say the city is meeting a national standard of getting advanced life support units to critical cases within eight minutes 90% of the time. Experts say success in keeping cardiac arrest patients alive is one of the most telling indicators of the overall quality of an emergency medical system.
A report released by The Commonwealth Fund has found wide disparities among states in regards to child healthcare. The report compiled an array of 13 measures relating to access to medical care, quality and cost for children in each state. Overall, Iowa ranked first and Oklahoma ranked last. The report also found that top-performing states tend to have lower rates of uninsured children than those ranked at the bottom, but also have higher health costs.
Harvard School of Public Health professor Lucian L. Leape, MD, is one of the nation's top experts on patient safety. Nearly 20 years ago, his research startled the nation with such findings as one of every 200 patients admitted to a hospital died as a result of a hospital mistake. Leape now says that while the industry has made great strides to improve patient safety, much more needs to be done. Part of the solution is to automate and hand off some of the non-care functions so that healthcare professionals can spend more time engaging with and treating patients, Leape said recently during the annual congress of the National Patient Safety Foundation.
Some hospitals are taking steps to improve safety and reduce their own legal liability from mishaps that lead to higher rates of death, complications, and medical errors that occur when treating patients during thinly staffed off hours. Hospitals are hiring physicians known as nocturnists, who work only night shifts, and some hospitals have begun staffing intensive-care units round-the-clock with critical-care specialists who do double-duty coping with a crisis anywhere in the hospital. And new policies improve communications at the hand-off between the day and night shifts.
Higher levels of medical care spending do not improve patients' perceptions of the care they receive, according to University of Massachusetts researchers who conducted a survey of Medicare beneficiaries. Researchers surveyed 2,515 Medicare beneficiaries about their perceptions of healthcare quality and compared their answers to per capita spending in various regions across the United States. There was a strong link between per capita spending and receiving more medical care, such as average number of ambulatory visits to physicians in the past year. But seven of the 10 measures of patients' perception of healthcare quality—such as unmet needs for tests and treatment, and spending enough time with doctors—were unrelated to expenditures, according to researchers.