Washington Week: FDA Staff Slam Avandia; Obama Instals Berwick in CMS Post

The Article Informs:

The public can now review data on the quality of outpatient care provided by individual hospitals at the CMS Hospital Compare website.

The site previously contained only data on inpatient care quality.

All data on the website are derived from records of Medicare patients treated at more than 3,600 hospitals nationwide.

Among the data now available for most acute-care hospitals:

• Rates of follow-up imaging studies among women screened with mammography
• Periprocedural antibiotic use in patients undergoing outpatient surgery
• Aspirin administration to outpatients presenting with chest pain or heart attacks
• Use of MRI in patients with lower back pain who had not tried physical therapy or other first-line treatments
• Rates of "double" or combination chest or abdominal CT scans

A total of 11 outpatient care quality measures are now included in Hospital Compare, added to 26 measures of inpatient outcomes and processes. The latter include 30-day mortality and readmission rates, use of antibiotics in conjunction with inpatient surgeries, glucose control among heart surgery patients, and use of antithrombotic drugs following certain procedures.

Hospital Compare also includes patient survey results for individual hospitals on 10 questions about their experiences, such as whether pain was well controlled and whether their rooms were quiet at night.