About This Hospital Quality Website
Greater Cincinnati hospitals are pleased to present this quality website to the community. Making this data available is evidence of hospitals' commitment to provide information that helps consumers to be partners in the journey to better care. Patients should use this data to ask their doctors or other health providers questions about their care and to better educate themselves about various measures of hospital quality.
The data provided on this website reflects hospital performance in 2007. It is important to note that this information will change over time as hospitals learn from the data and make improvements. These changes and improvements are outlined on the Quality Trends page. A hospital's quality is more than just its scores on these measures. This website is part of a larger effort, the Hospital Quality Improvement Project, in which hospitals have come together in a non-competitive setting to help one another in their journey to provide better care both within their own institutions and across the entire community.
What is Quality?
Quality of hospital care can mean different things. It could mean that there is a successful outcome (for example: a patient survived a heart attack or is cured of pneumonia) or it may mean that patients were satisfied with their hospital stay and thought they were treated well. Process measures are another way to measure quality of care. A process measure determines if a patient was given a needed medicine, treatment or test at the right time. Through research, national guidelines have been established for the recommended care of patients with various medical conditions by The Joint Commission, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the National Quality Forum (NQF). Three common medical conditions that have been broadly studied are heart attacks, heart failure, and pneumonia. It is very common for hospitalized adults to receive treatment for one of these reasons. Getting the recommended care means you are more likely to have better outcomes. The percentage of cases in which the participating hospitals follow these guidelines is reported on this website.
