CalHospitalCompare.org

Why Quality Matters

You need to be admitted at your local hospital for surgery. How do you know that hospital will offer you the best possible care?

In the past, there wasn't much information about the quality of hospitals, but over the past few years, medical researchers have developed tools to help patients, doctors, and hospitals figure out just how good our hospital care is. The quality ratings on this site cover specific conditions, treatments, or procedures, as well as what patients thought of their care and how safe the hospitals are. Because rating information is costly and difficult to produce, a limited number of conditions, treatments, and procedures are included, but more will be added in the months to come.

The rating categories on this site together give you the clearest picture available of what kind of care you can expect to receive in your hospital of choice. When you search on a hospital, the following ratings are provided, although not every rating is available for every procedure or condition:

• Mortality. Tells you the percentage of patients that died as a result of a specific procedure or treatment. For mortality, the lower the number, the better.
• Timeliness of Care. Getting the right care at the right time is an important measure of quality. These ratings let you know how the hospital does at providing drugs or performing procedures in a timeframe that is widely recognized as best for the patient.
• Quality of Care. These ratings show you how well the hospital follows generally accepted standards of care, or "best practices," for particular conditions, such as giving aspirin to heart attack victims or antibiotics to patients before surgery.
• Patient Safety. Many people fall ill or even die as the result of getting a wrong drug or wrong dose of a medication. Others may not have a good outcome because the doctor treating them does not have a high level of expertise and experience with their particular condition. Many procedures have been developed for hospitals to minimize these problems and to maximize patient safety. Though the safety ratings on this site are not usually specific to a particular condition or treatment, they provide a picture of the overall quality of care at a particular hospital. (As you prepare to enter a hospital, there are also steps you can take yourself to help protect against hospital errors that might lead to added illness or injury. See Reduce Your Risks.)
• Patient Experience. These patient experience ratings can give you a sense of what other patients say about the hospital you are considering. The ratings on this site reflect patient experience with physical, social, and emotional aspects of the hospital's overall medical care, as well as the particular experiences of maternity patients and those who had surgery.

Additional Ways to Measure Quality

Volume. Although this site does not offer data about how many patients were treated for each condition or procedure, evidence shows that the quality of care for patients with certain conditions or procedures is related to the number of patients treated at that hospital for those conditions or procedures. This does not necessarily guarantee that the hospital that treats the most patients with your condition is the best hospital for you. However, treatment of a higher number of patients for a particular procedure or condition often results in better overall results, especially for risky or extremely difficult procedures. You should ask your doctor or a hospital administrator if there are any data about the number of patients who have had the same condition or procedure as you will and what that information means for you and your hospital choice.

Other Quality Resources. Other measures of quality not provided on this site at this time may be available for a particular hospital. The following resources are available:

• Hospital Compare: This federal government-run site offers data on quality and timeliness of care.
• The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality: Also run by the federal government, this site has data on mortality rates and quality of care measures.
• The Leapfrog Group: This nonprofit organization provides data on patient safety.
• Quality Check: This site, run by the independent nonprofit The Joint Commission, provides data on timeliness and quality of care measures, as well as patient safety.