ShareThisBy JOE FAHY
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Officials are working to improve the health-care experience for patients, often by seeking advice from current or former patients or their family members.
Centers across the nation also are surveying former inpatients about a range of issues, including how often doctors and nurses treated them with courtesy and respect, how well their pain was controlled and whether they would recommend the hospitals that served them to friends or relatives.
Using information drawn from those surveys, consumers will be able to compare their local hospitals early next year. The data will be posted on a Web site, www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, which already indicates whether hospitals provide some types of treatment for heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia and surgical care. Plans call for adding mortality data for certain heart conditions next month.
The effort to provide the data involves the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and other members of the Hospital Quality Alliance, a collaborative of groups representing consumers, hospitals, doctors, employers, accrediting organizations and federal agencies.
Public reporting of patient-satisfaction data will give both consumers and hospitals information they have not had before, said Nancy Foster, vice president for quality and patient-safety policy for the American Hospital Association.
Hospitals aren't required to report their patient-survey results, though they face financial penalties from Medicare if they do not. Officials said they expect nearly all hospitals to comply.
In a report last year, Press Ganey Associates, a South Bend, Ind., firm that conducts patient surveys for many hospital systems, identified areas for improvement that are particularly important to patients.
Leading factors included the response made to concerns raised during a hospital stay and efforts to include patients in decisions about their treatment.
"Patients want regular and consistent communication," said company spokesman Matt Mulherin. "They want information about their care and their condition, but they also want to be involved in decisions. It is important to patients that communication goes both ways."
While patients expect to be listened to, "the health-care system doesn't do that very well," said James Conway, a senior vice president for the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
Hospitals that have long surveyed patients for internal use are now looking more closely at those data, in part because the information soon will be publicly disclosed, Conway said. But officials also believe that input from patients or their family members can lead to better care.
Conway noted, for example, the case of Josie King, an 18-month-old who died in 2001 at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore. Her medical team failed to notice her deteriorating condition despite concerns raised by her mother, Sorrel King.
The King family later reached a settlement with Johns Hopkins and used some of the funds to improve patient safety at the hospital.
Beverley Johnson, president of the Institute for Family-Centered Care, noted that a 2001 Institute of Medicine Report emphasized the importance of patient preferences in delivering health care. The report, "Crossing the Quality Chasm," recommended timely, efficient care that ensures "patient values guide all clinical decisions."
While surveys and focus groups are helpful, it is important that patients have other venues for sharing their ideas, such as serving on quality-improvement teams, Johnson said.
"We have a long way to go," she said, "but the momentum is clearly in this direction."
(Joe Fahy can be reached at jfahy(at)post-gazette.com. For more stories or to comment, visit scrippsnews.com.)
