Welcome to the Greater Cincinnati Health Council’s Hospital Quality Website. Our local hospitals are committed to providing information to help patients to be partners in the journey to better care. We hope that patients will use this website as a tool to help question providers about their care and to better educate themselves on the various measures of hospital quality.

The data provided on this website is updated annually during December of each year. The most recent data available on this site aligns with the latest information available from CMS.

For definitions to the more technical terms on this site, please refer to our glossary of terms.

About The Hospital Quality Website

Greater Cincinnati hospitals are pleased to present this quality website to the community. Patients should use the data provided to open a dialogue with their doctors and other health care providers to become active and educated participants in the maintenance of their health.

The data provided on this website reflects hospital performance in 2010. 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 measured by more than just its scores on these measures, and this website is part of a larger effort to help improve patient care throughout Greater Cincinnati’s hospitals.

Quality Measures

As it relates to hospital care, quality can mean a number of things including a successful outcome (ex: survival of a heart attack; cured pneumonia,) patient satisfaction or various other possibilities. 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 by The Joint Commission, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the National Quality Forum (NQF) for the recommended care of patients with various medical conditions. The 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. Better outcomes are more likely to occur if recommended care is being given, however, the care outlined in the national guidelines may not be the best treatment for all. Specific reasons such as medication allergies may be cause to alter treatment and therefore those who do not receive recommended care are not included in the data represented here.