How to Use this Guide
Learn about a Hospital’s Experience in Providing Care
On this page, you’ll find answers to the following questions:
How do I find how frequently a hospital provides care for a medical condition?
How do I find how frequently a hospital performs recommended treatments for heart attacks, congestive heart failure, and pneumonia?
How do I see if a hospital’s performance has improved over time?
Select a question above or scroll down the page.
How do I find how frequently a hospital provides care for a medical condition?
After you Find a Hospital, you can see the number of cases a hospital has treated, their average length of stay, and the percentage of patients readmitted for a specific medical condition.
- Use the Find a Hospital link to locate a hospital and open the webpage describing its facility characteristics. Each hospital’s facility characteristics page displays a “Click here for care list” link.
For instructions on finding a hospital’s facility characteristics page, visit Find a Hospital to Provide Care.
- Select the “Click here for care list” link.
A list of care topics display.
- Select the care topic of your interests.
A page displays a list of options.
- Select Overview of Care Provided.
A table displays a list of medical conditions related to the care topic you selected. The table displays the number of patients, their average length of stay, and percentage of patients readmitted for each medical condition.
- To compare these numbers with other hospitals, select the chart icon in the Look at all Maryland Hospitals column.
A bar chart displays the number of cases, their average length of stay, and percentage of patients readmitted for all Maryland Hospitals for the medical condition you selected.
For this report, a higher number of patients generally suggest a hospital has greater experience in providing treatment. However, take into consideration the average length of stay and readmission rates. If Hospital D’s lengths of stay and readmission rate are lower than Hospital C’s figures, this might indicate that Hospital D was better at caring for patients, even though the number of patients they treated was small.
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How do I find how frequently a hospital performs recommended treatments for heart attacks, congestive heart failure, and pneumonia?
After you Find a Hospital, you can check how often it performs recommended treatments, called quality measures. This guide reports on the quality measures taken for heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia.
- Use the Find a Hospital link to locate a hospital and open the webpage describing its facility characteristics. Each hospital’s facility characteristics page displays a “Click here for care list” link.
For instructions on finding a hospital’s facility characteristics page, visit Find a Hospital to Provide Care.
- Select the “Click here for care list” link.
A list of care topics display.
- Select Heart Conditions to see reports on heart attack and heart failure, or select Lung Conditions to see reports on pneumonia.
A page displays a list of options.
- Select the Quality of Care Measures option.
A table displays a list of recommended treatments related to the care topic you selected. For each treatment, the table displays the number of times performed, percentage of times performed, state average, and highest rate in Maryland.
- To compare these numbers with other hospitals, select the chart icon in the Look at all Maryland Hospitals column.
A bar chart displays the percentage of times the recommended treatment was performed for each Maryland hospital.
To understand these numbers, consider the quality measure for the use of aspirin for heart attack patients. You can review the bar chart to identify trends of care. Three hospitals give aspirin to heart attack patients 100 percent of the time. Nineteen hospitals have performance above the 91.73 percent state average. Only one hospital is below 85 percent. Overall, the majority of the Maryland hospitals offer this recommended treatment regularly.
Remember, some patients may be unable to take aspirin. Their case will cause a lower percentage to be calculated for this treatment.
Ask for your doctor’s opinion on any recommended treatment and to help you understand the results of this chart.
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How do I see if a hospital’s performance has improved over time?
This question is answered on the Performance Over Time graphs. These graphs review the hospital’s performance of recommended treatments over a one-year period. Each Quality Measure for one medical condition is shown on one graph. The performance for one three month period is shown in one bar. You should see multiple bars for each Quality Measure.
- Use the Find a Hospital link to locate a hospital and open the webpage describing its facility characteristics. Each hospital’s facility characteristics page displays a “Click here for care list” link.
For instructions on finding a hospital’s facility characteristics page, visit Find a Hospital to Provide Care.
- Select the “Click here for care list” link.
A list of care topics display.
- Select Heart Conditions to see reports on heart attack and heart failure, or select Lung Conditions to see reports on pneumonia.
A page displays a list of options.
- Select the Quality of Care Measures option.
A table displays a list of recommended treatments related to the care topic you selected. A Performance Over Time link displays for each medical condition represented on the table.
- Select the Performance Over Time link.
A bar chart displays the percentage of times the recommended treatment was performed for each quarter over a year’s time.
Has the hospital’s performance improved? If the bars on the graph continue to increase in size, then the answer is yes. A higher bar means the hospital is performing the Quality Measure more often. A lower bar means the hospital is performing the Quality Measure less often. Remember, hospitals should strive to perform each Quality Measure 100 percent of the time.
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