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“You show me – I’ll show you”
By Dr. David Edward Marcinko; MBA, CMP™
[Publisher-in-Chief]
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS] just launched an advertising campaign to demonstrate how some patients get needed help … and how other hospitals give surgical patients antibiotics! Say what?
Site Traffic Quadruples
Yep! All told, the ads include more than 2,500 hospitals, according to the Associated Press. Of course, in true advertising fashion, the CMS wants patients to be intrigued enough by the marketing “teasers” to visit www.HospitalCompare.com when considering what hospitals to … and they used the word … “patronize.”
Publicity over changes made to the site in March 2008 helped quadruple traffic.
A Questionable Start
Reviewers and critics hale Hospital Compare with a solid enough start, but it still lacks real “quality outcome” measures.
Instead, the site measures procedures, or how well the facility follows standard guidelines. The site’s only mortality gauge for example – for heart attack and heart failure – lumps virtually all hospitals into the “normal” category, with just a handful ranked above or below them.
But, they are expected to show statewide averages for those benchmarks, sometime soon.
The Site
Hopefully, the site will begin to demonstrate the type of medical care quality review, severity rating adjustments and proper drill-down analysis that readers of the Medical Executive-Post have come to expect from the likes of our section-editor, the luminous Dr. Brent A. Metfessel MS, CMP™ (Hon). Until then, it may just be the best available information for now. And, can a Doctor Compare service be next?
Assessment
Do you expect this type of hospital specific – and more general medical practice and industry – healthcare transparency to continue? Is it a help to patients – and providers – or just more marketing obfuscation [like being Valedictorian in your DUI school class]? Please opine.
Conclusion
Your thoughts and comments on this ME-P are appreciated. Feel free to review our top-left column, and top-right sidebar materials, links, URLs and related websites, too. Then, subscribe to the ME-P. It is fast, free and secure.
Speaker: If you need a moderator or speaker for an upcoming event, Dr. David E. Marcinko; MBA – Publisher-in-Chief of the Medical Executive-Post – is available for seminar or speaking engagements. Contact: MarcinkoAdvisors@msn.com
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Filed under: Career Development, Managed Care, Marketing & Advertising |
The Leading Business Education Network for Doctors, Financial Advisors and Health Industry Consultants 
Block those Rankings – Rah! Rah! Rah!
Did you know that the Massachusetts Medical Society [MMS] filed a lawsuit to block or change a ranking program it says harms doctors and patients?
The program, used by the agency that oversees health insurance for state and local employees, ranks doctors in three tiers based on various cost and quality measures. And, patients must pay more to see a physician who isn’t in the top tier.
The president of the MMS reported in a statement that the system is flawed, with doctors “assigned costs from patients they did not treat, and for procedures they did not perform. This is misleading and simply not fair.”
Doctors and insurers have been making progress toward agreeing on a framework for doctor rating programs and increased pricing transparency. Driven largely by pressure from New York AG Andrew Cuomo, a national standard is emerging. It includes third-party review, an appeals process for doctors, and published criteria that include not only cost but also quality measures, according to the Wall Street Journal.
And so, your thoughts are appreciated. And, is this sentiment the polar opposite of the above post?
Joel
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Is the New Medicare “Physician Compare” Website a Failure?
Link: http://www.medicare.gov/find-a-doctor/provider-search.aspx
Review: http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2011/01/fixing-the-failure-at-physician-compare-.html#comments
Tracy
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Dr. Marcinko
Consumers looking to compare doctors and hospitals are getting a new resource as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launches an online state-by-state directory of healthcare providers.
The directory features an interactive map of the 50 states that consumers can click on to access 197 state-level and 27 national quality databases set up by nonprofits, health plans and government agencies nationwide.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/health/la-heb-health-quality-20110628,0,5212989.story
Linda
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Do Hospitals Dislike Hospital Compare?
Hospitals with low scores are arguing that recent data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) of 30-day mortality rates and readmissions of inpatient heart attacks, heart failure, and pneumonia do not tell the whole story.
http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/story/low-scoring-hospitals-rebuff-hospital-compare-quality-finder-data/2011-08-08?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal
Mary
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Open Payments Site Scheduled for More Downtime; Complaints Continue
The troubled Open Payments Act website is encountering a bit more turbulence. The CMS just announced that it plans upcoming outages for the site and that downtime would be used for “scheduled maintenance upgrades.”
As a result, the review-and-dispute process for doctor data displayed on the site will be extended until Sept. 10, the agency said. That delay will push the corrections period to Sept. 25. The agency still says that the data will be released to the public Sept. 30. The outages are scheduled for Aug. 30 between 1 and 11 a.m., and Sept. 5 for an as-yet-undisclosed duration.
The latest delay comes after trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America questioned the agency’s transparency in rejecting data submissions from manufacturers for the site.
The CMS, concerned with the possibility of intermingling, that is, matching payments data with the wrong doctor, has reportedly sent back about one-third of records for manufacturer correction.
Source: Darius Tahir, Modern Healthcare [8/28/14]
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