Imagine if you could comparison shop when choosing a hospital. That's already the case in some parts of the US, and the United Kingdom is proposing hospital report cards by year's end. Can Canada be far behind?
Several provinces are already considering report cards for hospitals, with British Columbia and Ontario taking the lead. BC has published province-wide averages for hospital wait times (www.gov.bc.ca/), but Dr. Vivek Goel says Ontario appears to be the only province taking a systematic approach to hospital evaluations. “There is a huge public demand for this type of information,” says Goel, head of the University of Toronto's Department of Health Administration.
The Ontario Hospital Association (www.oha.com/) published hospital report cards in 1999 and 1998. The latter, billed as “Canada's largest and most comprehensive report on hospital performance,” looked at 4 key areas: financial performance, patient satisfaction, clinical outcomes and organization integration and development.
To help prepare the “snapshot,” a research team from the University of Toronto surveyed more than 26 000 patients. Eighty-nine hospitals representing 91% of the province's acute-care facilities participated in the voluntary review.
The UK, meanwhile, is already going national with its report-card system. Its secretary of state for health recently promised annual reports rating every hospital's overall performance.
In addition, within a year the UK will begin releasing previously unpublished data on hospital waiting times, delayed discharges, lengths of stay, hospital cleanliness and cancelled operations.
In the US, several private companies offer rating systems. One Web site (www.healthgrades.com/) allows consumers to check how American hospitals rank according to a 5-star rating system.
“The problem is [that] they don't tell you how the stars are derived,” says Goel, who envisions a similar Canadian Web site in the future. “I would like to see something that lets people find out information on hospitals, but in a transparent manner with open sets of data.”
But will collecting and publishing the data have any impact? “It's important for doctors and hospital administrators to act upon the data rather than just reporting on it,” Goel says. —
Signature
Janis Hass
Ottawa