Centers for Medicaid and Medicare (Medicare.gov)
This is the big honkin’ web-based government comparison tool for healthcare consumers. It’s got two main components: Hospital compare (www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/ ) and nursing home compare (http://www.medicare.gov/NHCompare/ ). You can get bed counts, quality and assessment info, and more. The downside is it’s not easy to extract large amounts of data right off the Web. There’s always FOIA.
The Joint Commission’s Quality Check: http://www.jointcommission.org/
The Joint Commission “evaluates and accredits more than 15,000 health care organizations and programs in the
The Kaiser Family Foundation’s State Health Facts: http://www.statehealthfacts.org/
This is a terrific, easy to use and download from resource for state level data on Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, HIV/AIDS, women’s health, children’s health, etc.
State hospital associations and others
Many states have their own hospital associations and other groups that collect and distribute data on individual facilities. Pay attention to whether data is self-reported. In
Health departments and departments of vital statistics
Tons of stuff here that speaks to demographics and births, deaths, causes of death, etc.
Virginia Health Information: http://www.vhi.org
Good quick reference for hospital accreditation, bed bounts, staffing and the like.
Virginia Price Point: http://www.vapricepoint.org/
Quick search by hospital to see charges for individual kinds of procedures, plus comparison figures for the region and the state. In addition, you get quick reference numbers and graphics on it’s total charges and payment mix.
A few other examples:
http://quality.mdhospitals.org/
http://mhcc.maryland.gov/public_use_files/index.aspx
