CMS has
updated the data housed on Hospital Compare, as well as revamped the Hospital
Star Ratings formulary.
By Sara Heath
February 28,
2019 - CMS has proposed updates to the Hospital Star Ratings
formulary, according to an agency statement. These changes come in response to
public criticism stating that the Hospital Star Ratings are not always accurate
portrayals of hospital quality.
The changes would
allow for more precise hospital rankings, CMS said. Additionally, the updates
would help patients make more “like-to-like” comparisons, meaning they could
compare similar hospitals. The agency would accomplish this by placing
hospitals into peer groups – meaning small rural hospitals would not be
compared to larger, academic hospitals.
Those changes will
help patients make more informed decisions about their care, CMS said. The
proposal will be open for public comment until March 29, 2019.
These proposed
updates come amidst sharp criticism from key industry leaders.
The American Hospital
Association, for example, has long denounced the Hospital Star Ratings
formulary, saying it is too simple and does not offer an accurate portrayal of
hospital quality.
As recently as
September 2017, AHA has called into question whether the data
offered in the Hospital Star Ratings listings was ready for patients. This data
does not represent the nuances of hospital quality. After all, the Star Ratings
are a five-point distillation of nearly 60 care quality indicators.
“The AHA has long
supported transparency and continues to share CMS’s goal of making the data on
Hospital Compare easier for consumers to understand,” AHA said in a 2017 letter
about Star Ratings updates. “However, CMS’s flawed approach to star ratings
undermines this goal by providing an inaccurate, misleading picture of hospital
quality.”
These most recent
proposed updates aim to address the way patients compare hospitals by allowing
patients to view hospitals that are similar in the same category. The proposal
will not necessarily address the formulary issues AHA and other stakeholders
have pointed out.
CMS has also added
new data to its Hospital Compare website, the patient-facing tool aimed at
helping healthcare consumers make informed decisions about care access.
The data includes
quarterly assessments of hospital quality, as well as the Hospital Star
Ratings, which were most recently updated in December 2017.
These updates aim to
improve the patient experience with the Hospital Compare tool, specifically by
ensuring patients have the most recent information available for treatment
decisions, said CMS Administrator Seema Verma.
“The Hospital
Compare website and Star Ratings System are valuable consumer tools that
provide helpful and important information on the safety and quality of our
nation’s hospitals,” Verma said in a statement. “These decision-making tools
offer greater transparency on hospital performance for a wide variety of users
– patients, caregivers, families, and the broader healthcare industry. We
constantly aim to improve these resources with feedback from stakeholders, and
we are confident this latest update of Hospital Compare data further
strengthens this data.”
In addition to
informing patient and family treatment decisions, CMS intends the Hospital
Compare websites to inspire quality improvements. With care quality
data publicly posted, the agency expects hospitals to continually work for
improvement.
The Hospital Compare
website currently offers patients access to quality data about nearly 4,000
Medicare hospitals, as well as about Veterans Health Administration and
Military Health Services hospitals. The website allows patients to search by
medical condition, as well as by patient experience score, timeliness and
effectiveness of care, and complication rates.
This data disclosure
is presented in an easy-to-understand format, taking into account various
levels of health literacy, CMS says.
Currently, hospitals
have 30 days to review their quality data before it is publicly posted to the
Hospital Compare website.
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