10.28.11 | Brandon Glenn

Goodbye to Ohio’s hospital performance comparison website?

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.

Brandon Glenn MedCity News

Brandon Glenn is the Ohio bureau chief for MedCity News.

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Tags: hospitals, Ohio, Politics

Comments Post a comment

Thank you for writing about this Brandon. It never ceases to amaze how hard the OHA works to avoid accountability. We need nationally mandated reporting of outcomes that is meaningful and accessible to health care consumers, also known as, patients.

Comment by Michelle Mahon — October 28, 2011 @ 2:34 pm

I don’t believe that the ODH site isn’t functional for deliberate reasons as stated in this article…that’s a bit dramatic isn’t it? This was an unfunded mandate, and it shows. From a hospital’s perspective, there have been several problems with the program since it’s rollout, including multiple user instruction manual errors and the like. The program hasn’t had the resources needed to make it work correctly, but to be honest, this site isn’t needed in the first place.

Also…Michelle, you might want to do some very basic research before spouting off populist nonsense about the Ohio Hospital Association and the need for “nationally mandated reporting of outcomes that is meaningful and accessible to healthcare consumers”. WE ALREADY HAVE this information “nationally”…it can be found with a simple Google or Bing search.

I work in a hospital and can tell you unequivocally that the ODH site is unnecessary. Virtually all of the information it makes available is also available on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid site called hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, with a bonus…their site WORKS and compares hospitals not only locally, but nationally. Since January 2010, hospitals have been required to report the exact same information to a government agency…TWICE…once to CMS and now again to ODH. This might be completely appropriate and expected in a government bureacracy fraught with waste, but in a hospital that does its utmost to operate efficiently, its a massive waste of time. These agencies should be able to SHARE this information if they want to duplicate efforts, not waste a hospital’s resources to perform double duty.

Finally, the proposed elimination of this website is not an attempt to “avoid accountabilty” and hide information, as you are inferring. If anything, hospitals are becoming more and more transparent about their quality and public reporting, and this trend is growing rapidly. Consumers can find this information in a wealth of places on the web…you simply have to do a basic search. For example:

–hospitalcompare.hhs.gov
–Healthgrades.com
–Carechex
–Jointcommission.org (select the “Find an accredited or certified organization” link, and then view their quality report”)

…just to name a few. Do you hear any protests from the Ohio Hospital Association regarding these sites? NO…because they utilize the SAME data from ONE submission of hospital data…no duplication of effort, no waste of resources, and MORE usable data by the consumer. Honestly Michelle, you sound like a union member. Brandon, kudos to you for at least trying to report both sides, even if your article is slanted to the left.

Comment by Hospquality — October 31, 2011 @ 12:21 pm

Hospitquality – you are incorrect on several points. The data is not exactly identical as that reported in other places. In fact, some types of quality measures aren’t reported publicly anywhere. For example, even under the cloak of secrecy CCF will not report their infection rates to the LeapFrog group and infection reporting has been a constant point of contention with Ohio Hospital Compare. The goal of Ohio Hospital Compare was to improve data reporting. Any hopes of this were dashed by the UNION of hospitals OHA with their constant battle to avoid reporting(some suggested modeling off of the state of PA surgical infection reporting). Healthgrades, carechex do not provide meaningful information. In addition, being accredited by Joint Commission does little to assure quality. TJC does not publicly report sentinal events nor do they actual mandate that they are reported.So few hospitals actually report these events that fewer than 13 per year have been reviewed for the State of Ohio in the past 12 years. I have reviewed more sentinal events that TJC. TJC are so vaguely written that they do not provide much regulation or accountability at all(not surprising since the hospitals fund TJC). There are many experts on patient safety who agree that public reporting of quality measures and adverse outcomes is dangerously abysmal, including the IOM.

Comment by Michelle Mahon — November 1, 2011 @ 8:43 pm