A California Web site offers access to hospital quality data in an effort to promote transparency in the often opaque world of inpatient medical care.

CalHospitalCompare.org is the culmination of a three-year, $14 million project that sifts through state data, patient charts and consumer surveys from 212 California hospitals, accounting for 70 percent of hospital admissions in the state.  

The Web site aims to help consumers and health purchasers, including insurers, businesses and government, make more-informed decisions about hospital care.

The website is the result of a partnership between three independent organizations dedicated to improving health care quality: The California HealthCare Foundation, the University of California at San Francisco Institute for Health Policy Studies, and the California Hospitals Assessment and Reporting Taskforce (CHART). This site includes ratings for clinical care, patient safety, and patient experience for the 210 hospitals in California that have chosen to participate in this important voluntary project.

The California Hospital Assessment and Reporting Taskforce (CHART) was established in 2004 to develop a statewide hospital performance reporting system using a multi-stakeholder collaborative process. The stakeholder group includes consumers; purchasers of health insurance, such as businesses and labor organizations; health plans; hospitals; physicians; nurses; health care quality experts from government and academic institutions; and regulators. CHART brings together all these relevant stakeholders in California health care to:

Select key aspects of hospital performance to measure and report;

• Agree upon a uniform, scientifically valid approach to measurement for all California hospitals;
• Collect and aggregate the data as defined and specified;
• Confirm the validity of the measurements made;
• Provide hospitals and clinicians with valid measures and benchmarking data on which to base quality improvement efforts; and
• Report the performance of individual California hospitals to consumers, purchasers, and health plans.

"We anticipate and hope that CalHospitalCompare becomes the gold standard for hospital information," said Dr. Bruce Spurlock, chairman of the steering committee overseeing the project.

The site ranks participating hospitals in 50 areas of performance, including conditions such as cardiac care, maternity services and pneumonia treatment. It has 36 patient satisfaction and experience measures.

People can search the site by zip code, city, county, hospital name or medical condition. The Web site allows consumers to compare up to five hospitals side-by-side.

Major health plans such as Kaiser, Health Net and Blue Shield of California contributed a total of $3 million to the project, as did the nonprofit California HealthCare Foundation. Hospitals provided $8 million total in in-kind donations.

Major health plans have committed to supporting the project in the future and referring members to the Web site.  Hospital participation is strictly voluntary, and the main reason why hospitals declined was the cost of compiling and making available all the data, Spurlock said.

Fifteen omitted hospitals pledged to opt-in next year, said Maribeth Shannon of the California HealthCare Foundation.

Children's hospitals, excluded in the launch, will be invited to participate next year.

The data were collected and analyzed by the University of California San Francisco Institute for Health Policy Studies. Dr. R. Adams Dudley, associate professor of medicine and health policy at UCSF, who directed this effort, said data were thoroughly reviewed. "We went through an extensive process of checking the accuracy of the data," Dudley said.

This process included sending teams to each hospital to do spot chart reviews and adjusting data to account for various patient populations. Mortality data will be added in the next 12 to 18 months. "Overall, I think this is a very extensive, very high quality collection of data," Dudley said.

Kaiser Permanente hospitals in the Bay Area — including Oakland, Richmond, Walnut Creek, Hayward, Fremont, Santa Teresa, Redwood City and South San Francisco — rated "superior" in heart attack care. But many of the same hospitals rated "poor" or "below average" in overall patient satisfaction and other categories.

Dr. Alan Whippy, director of quality and safety for Kaiser Northern California, said Kaiser is taking the ratings seriously but that some of the categories don't take into account outpatient and other follow-up care needed for good outcomes. She also said some of the data is at least a year old and doesn't reflect recent changes.

"I don't believe those scores reflect the quality of care we provide in the majority of instances because it doesn't reflect the full spectrum of care," Whippy said. "We have to look at this (Web site) as a work in progress."

The data will be updated quarterly. To find out how Tri-City area hospitals rate, visit http://www.calhospitalcompare.org.

Adapted from InsideBayArea story by Rebecca Vesely