Safety records for Virginia hospitals now available online

The public now has the ability to check how Virginia hospitals rank in patient safety. The Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association, a health system advocacy group, has launched the Quality and Patient Safety Scorecard, an interactive online scorecard that includes patient safety records for 80 facilities. Each scorecard has information about a hospital's health care-associated infections, patient safety, hospital readmission rates, mortality data and patient satisfaction. The score also includes the efficiency of Medicare spending per beneficiary. The scorecard gathers data from several sources, including the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Virginia Health Information and the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey.