Providence Health & Services

Searching the Internet for information on hospital quality can be an overwhelming experience. There is a lot of information out there — how do you sift through it all to find information that is accurate and relevant to your interests? Here are our recommendations:

• Stick with public sites created by federal agencies and well-known advocacy groups. You'll find links to several trusted sites within this Web site.
• Try not to get bogged down in the details. View quality measures as a reflection of a hospital's overall clinical reliability and consistency of care.
• Look beyond the Internet and ask your own trusted sources — family members, friends and other personal contacts — about the quality of their care experiences.
• View our FAQs for answers to commonly asked questions. (pagebuild needed??)
• See Key Terms for definitions to terms you may see in other health care quality Web sites. (pagebuild needed??)
• Check Other Resources if you still have questions. (pagebuild needed??)

Getting Started

For an example of the type of information a good Web site can provide, visit Hospital Compare.

This excellent tool was developed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in collaboration with organizations that represent hospitals, doctors and nurses, employers, accrediting organizations, federal agencies and the general public. It is one of the most reliable and user-friendly sources available online.

Hospital Compare provides information related to three areas of quality performance:

• The process of care: how consistently a hospital provides the recommended care for preventing surgical complications or for treating specific conditions
• The outcome of care: the results of care, compared to national averages
• The patient's experience: patient satisfaction ratings taken from a national survey of hospital patients

After you click on the Web site's "Find and Compare Hospitals" tool (found on the home page), you can search for information in two ways:

• Search by specific conditions or procedures: use this option if you want to know how a hospital performs in a specific type of care, such as diabetes or heart failure.
• General search: use this option to compare hospitals' overall performance (the site looks at surgery and treatment for three conditions).

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