Medicare's Hospital Compare website rates local hospital care

Have you wondered how your area hospitals stack up in terms of the quality of care they provide?

Emergencies obviously call for rushing to the nearest hospital. But when you have time to plan, it is worth doing some research and finding out which hospitals do the best job of caring for their patients.

Medicare's Hospital Compare website -at medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/-has made it easier for you to check that. The site has overall star ratings to help you better understand which hospitals are top performers, which are average and which need improvement. The ratings range from one to five stars, with five being the best.

The Hospital Compare site already enjoys a solid reputation with the public, showing how thousands of hospitals scored on various indicators of quality care. You can compare hospitals on the basis of such factors as clinical outcomes, customer satisfaction and patient safety. The just-updated overall star ratings offer a snapshot of particular hospitals' quality of care, by summing up individual measures of hospital performance already posted on the website. The ratings reflect such factors as how often patients get infections after surgery, how long patients must wait in the emergency department before seeing a doctor or nurse, and how likely patients are to get readmitted to the hospital after a heart attack.

The stars take into account the mix of patients at a hospital, so that those facilities with a high percentage of sicker patients aren't rated lower than those that handle more run-ofthe-mill cases.

Medicare assigned stars to 3, 692 Medicare-certified hospitals nationwide. Another 887 couldn't be included, mostly because they didn't have enough data to properly evaluate them. They may have been too new or too small and, therefore, had too few cases on which to base ratings. The ratings will be updated regularly on the website, as the government continues to collect the most recent data. Nationally, 260 hospitals received five stars, 753 rated four stars, 1, 187 scored three stars, 1, 155 received two stars, and 337 had just one star.

The 274 rated Texas hospitals scored an average of 3.3 stars for overall quality of care. Thirty-three hospitals received five stars, 84 rated four stars, 105 scored three stars, 43 received two stars, and nine had just one star.

Here are the scores for all area hospitals: Cedar Park -Cedar Park Regional Medical Center -3 Burnet -Seton Highland Lakes -3 Fredericksburg -Hill Country Memorial Hospital - 5 Lampasas -Rollins Brook Community Hospital - 3 Llano -Baylor Scott and White Medical Center -Llano -3 Marble Falls -Baylor Scott and White Medical Center Marble Falls -4 Other Texas hospitals' star ratings can be found at medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/.

By using star ratings on its Compare websites, Medicare is trying to help you make more informed decisions about your health care. The public reporting also gives low-performing providers a compelling incentive to improve their practices and procedures and, hence, their scores.

Nursing Home Compare, Home Health Compare and the Medicare Plan Finder also use star ratings to help you check out health care providers and choose one with quality in mind.

Of course, as informative as these websites can be, they can't tell the whole story about where to go for care. They're simply a screening tool that lets you focus on a few providers that interest you.

Visit with your doctor about the best hospital for you. Research shows that some hospitals do better than others at treating certain conditions. And talk to family members and friends about what they liked or disliked about their recent hospital stays and which facilities they'd recommend.

Medicare also recently updated its "Guide to Choosing a Hospital," which includes a checklist of questions to ask your doctor and explains how to find the hospital that's the right fit for you. A free copy can be downloaded at medicare.gov or requested by calling Medicare at 1-800-633-4227.

Once you've done your homework, you'll have peace of mind knowing you've made an informed choice about your care. Then you can concentrate on the rest of your preparations for your hospital stay.

Bob Moos is the Southwest regional public affairs officer for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.