As of March 5, Fairview Health Services in Minneapolis has been publicly posting detailed quality and safety performance data on its web site, and the Texas Hospital Association has launched Texas PricePoint, a web site that allows consumers to compare charge data on the most common inpatient services at Texas hospitals.
Consumers can access Fairview’s progress on internal measures addressing hand hygiene, medication reconciliation, patient identification, and patient fall rates. The web site also includes Fairview’s reported incidences of 27 types of serious events. Users can click on diseases and conditions and view charts showing what percentage of patients at Fairview hospitals receive appropriate care measures. The site also contains data pulled from Fairview’s patient satisfaction survey results, and charts show how well Fairview patients think they are involved in their care plans.
With Texas PricePoint, users can request information on a single hospital or from several for comparisons. The web site--which uses hospital-supplied data from the Texas Health Care Information Collection and the annual survey of hospitals, as well as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Hospital Compare web site and The Joint Commission--is operated under contract with WHA Information Center, a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Hospital Association. States with similar hospital charge transparency web sites include Georgia, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
