Hospitals, Policy

Goodbye to Ohio’s hospital performance comparison website?

Launched with much fanfare just last year, a state-backed website that allows consumers to compare […]

Launched with much fanfare just last year, a state-backed website that allows consumers to compare performance data among Ohio hospitals may not be around much longer — and in a sense, it’s already gone.

The Ohio Hospital Association (OHA) is backing a piece of recently introduced legislation that would free hospitals from the requirement to report performance data such as measures of heart and surgical care, infection rates and patient satisfaction. Without that requirement in place, the Ohio Hospital Compare site would be no more, according to the bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Barbara Sears.

But a recent visit to the site revealed that it’s unusable, perhaps deliberately so. A drop box that should allow users to select any of the state’s counties to browse by each one’s hospitals contained no list of counties. An attempt to search by zip code yielded an error message.

So, it seems that the Ohio Department of Health (ODH), which maintains the Ohio Hospital Compare site, has effectively made lawmakers’ decisions for them on this one. (After my inquiry to ODH — coincidentally or not — the site appears to be usable. )

Nonetheless, the ODH hasn’t taken a position on the new bill, according to spokeswoman Tessie Pollock.

“It was an unfunded mandate for ODH to collect the information and make it public, but where we head in the future depends on how [the bill] develops,” Pollock said.

Whether maintaining the site was burdensome or onerous for ODH is an open question. When asked directly, Pollock said she couldn’t say whether it had been or not.

The OHA supports the new legislation, House Bill 353, because it wants to remove “duplicative” reporting requirements on the state’s hospitals. Ohio hospitals already report the same data to a federal Hospital Compare website maintained for the public by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said OHA spokeswoman Tiffany Himmelreich.

The new legislation “doesn’t reduce reporting. It just eliminates reporting the same information to two different places,” she said. “We don’t want the public to feel that this is taking a step backwards in terms of data availability.”

The time and effort spent on reporting the data to the state as well as the federal government reduces the resources Ohio hospitals can devote to patient care, Himmelreich added.

The site was launched on Jan. 1, 2010 and went into effect as a result of a 2006 law that was signed by former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland.

Sears said the effort behind eliminating Ohio Hospital Compare was part of a larger push to reduce duplicative regulations in the state.

“Why should the state fund the cost of keeping a site up to date when it’s limited compared to what else is available?” she asked.

Brian Rothenberg, executive director of consumer group ProgressOhio, wasn’t too impressed by that argument. “It’s not that difficult to keep a website together and keep it accessible to people,” he said.

Eliminating the website is part of a broader recent trend toward less transparency from Ohio’s government, he said.

“Anything that turns the lights out on a consumer’s ability to see performance information about the medical industry is a bad public-policy move,” he said. “There’s a tendency in Columbus these days to pull down a lot of window shades on public disclosure.”

In any case, it’s an ignominious end for Ohio Hospital Compare, which was touted upon its launch as putting Ohio “among the leaders in the country” in hospital performance reporting by one consumer advocate.

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