Many of these infections can be prevented through the use of proper procedures and precautions. HAIs can occur in all settings of care, including acute care hospitals, long term acute care hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, surgical centers, cancer hospitals, and skilled nursing facilities. Healthcare-associated infections, or HAIs, are infections that people get while they’re getting treatment for another condition in a healthcare setting. Then I clicked on “Infections.” As Hospital Compare helpfully explains: I wanted to explore the causes of sepsis first and so I clicked on the “Complications & Deaths” tab. I hit “Compare Now” and was taken to a page of results. Vincent’s Medical Center (two stars), and Midstate Medical Center (four stars). So I chose Waterbury Hospital (one star), St. Because Hospital Compare only allows you to compare three hospitals at a time, I decided I would try out three different hospitals with three different overall quality scores. (If they don’t have an overall quality score, it usually means that Medicare did not have enough information to be able to give them a score.) Those are the little one- to five-star ratings you will see alongside the hospitals’ names. I also knew that I wanted to be able to have a good apples-to-apples comparison at the end, so I skipped any hospital that did not have an overall quality score. Because I knew I was interested in hospitals that were likely to deal with a lot of infections and sepsis, I knew that I wasn’t as interested in behavioral hospitals or psychiatric hospitals. Which to choose? The first thing you should do is decide what you’re trying to compare. I hit “search” and the site returned 13 different hospitals. (I had been talking with a colleague about their Yale undergraduate days and so thought I would check out hospitals in the Yale area.) The Arizona Republic, for example, took Medicare data and built its own interface for readers to view hospital quality scores.įor this exercise, I went to Hospital Compare and plugged in a ZIP code: 06501. (One flaw is that it seems to work better with some browsers than others - I would use Google Chrome.)ĭepending on your data skills, you may want to connect with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services directly about gaining access to the larger data set for you to conduct your own custom queries. Like all data query tools, it has its flaws, but prior to its existence there was no simple way to make sense of this massive data set. And I will share some important caveats along the way.įirst, if you have not used Hospital Compare before, it’s worth giving yourself a good hour to just play around with the site and read some of the introductory and explanatory material. In this post, I will walk you through a comparison of two hospitals using data from Medicare. There are a variety of datasets, though, that can give you clues and glimpses of how well hospitals near you are doing, both in terms of the underlying causes of sepsis and efforts to combat it once it is diagnosed. The total picture of how your health system handles - or, in some cases, causes - the full range of fatal and debilitating illnesses and injuries can be hard to grasp. You want to shine a light on the problem in the hopes we can better address the underlying causes of sepsis and better deploy known and effective treatments. If you’re like me, you are alarmed by the rates of complications and deaths from sepsis worldwide.
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