Decision Support Tools for Your Employees — Another great benefit of membership!

Access to the Texas Hospital Checkup

Quality Report Card Compares Hospital Performance Across Texas
Texas Hospital Checkup Now Available Online to the General Public

Choosing a hospital can be a life or death decision and patients now have the ability to compare hospital quality, outcomes and costs with an online hospital report card, Texas Hospital Checkup. The online resource was created by the Texas Business Group on Health (TBGH), a coalition of over 200 Texas employers, to help individuals become better informed healthcare consumers and ultimately to reduce medical errors and improve outcomes for patients.

Newly available at no cost to the general public, the Texas Hospital Checkup provides information on patient outcomes, length of stay, processes in place to reduce medical errors, and average retail costs for four types of heart surgery, heart attack care and childbirth performed at hospitals in 14 metropolitan areas across Texas. Consumers can compare quality and cost information about individual hospitals within a region, and also with all hospitals statewide.

The decision support tool, launched a year ago, was previously available only to coalition members and their employees during a 12-month pilot test phase. Based on the high number of employee users and their positive feedback, TBGH decided to open the Checkup web site to the public on January 1, 2004 as a community service.

"People often spend more time researching the purchase of an automobile than selecting a hospital for life-altering procedures," said Marianne Fazen, TBGH president and chief executive officer. "Hospitals vary greatly in patient outcomes, quality and costs. By making hospital performance information available to everyone without restriction, we are encouraging accountability among Texas providers and enabling patients to closely look at their local hospitals' performance before deciding which one to use for cardiac care or childbirth."

What to Look for in a Hospital
The Texas Hospital Checkup compares hospitals' performance for six types of care, including four heart procedures such as heart bypass surgery, heart attack care, and childbirth. Heart care information includes mortality rates— the number of people who die as a result of the procedures. Because heart surgeries and heart attack care are complicated and patients are often very sick, it is anticipated that a certain number of patients will die. The Texas Hospital Checkup takes into account the severity of patient illness when reporting mortality results in order to level the playing field among hospitals performing these types of procedures. The Checkup also reports the average patient stay and average retail costs.

For childbirth, the Texas Hospital Checkup shows the total number of deliveries at each hospital and a comparison of normal vaginal deliveries versus cesarean sections (C-sections). It also reports the average length of stay for each type of delivery, average charges, and number of babies cared for in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

This publicly available decision support tool also provides information about hospitals' progress toward adopting three national measures of patient safety: volume standards for specific procedures; staffing of intensive care units with critical care specialists; and computerized prescription ordering to help reduce medication errors. A hospital that implements all three of these measures is far less likely to make life-threatening, preventable medical mistakes than hospitals that don't adopt these patient safety measures.

Another useful feature on the Checkup web site is a special "Help for Healthy Living" web page that provides links to comprehensive health information resources. Here consumers can find out information on almost any health-related topic, including detailed descriptions of medical conditions and diseases, how these are diagnosed, and various treatment options.

Source of Information
The Texas Hospital Checkup was developed using information from three sources:
	Texas Healthcare Information Council (THCIC), the state agency that collects data from all hospitals in Texas and reports on the quality of their performance
	Leapfrog Group for Patient Safety, a national coalition of public and private health care purchasing organizations
	Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), recognized as the lead federal agency for protecting the health and safety of people at home and abroad