Florida Health News

Patients rate Florida hospitals with below-average scores

 By Carol Gentry
3/31/2008 © Florida Health News

In the first nationwide satisfaction survey of adult patients who’ve been hospitalized, Floridians showed they were less than thrilled with their treatment. Overall, Florida hospitals received satisfaction rates from 5 to 8 percentage points below the national average in all 10 categories.

See Survey Responses for Florida and Nation

The key question -- Would you recommend the hospital to friends and family? – drew affirmative answers from 61 percent of Floridians compared with 67 percent nationwide. A similar gap pops up in questions on cleanliness, noise, pain control and how well nurses and doctors communicate with patients.

AARP, which took part in designing the survey along with the hospital industry and federal health agencies, welcomed the release of the first results. But Lori Parham, state director for AARP Florida, said she’s concerned about the gap between the state and national ratings.

“We hope that posting the information would encourage hospitals to improve their scores,” Parham said. She added that upcoming budget cuts in hospital funding by the Florida Legislature could make it even more difficult to improve quality of care.

The satisfaction scores, released Friday at www.HospitalCompare.hhs.gov, are part of a “transparency” initiative being pushed by the Department of Health and Human Services. Also listed at the site are prices that Medicare pays each hospital for treatment of common ailments, such as a heart attack. The satisfaction rates and prices join earlier listings of quality-of-care measures by hospital, such as the percentage of patients who receive the right medicine within a given time after arrival.

The point is to harness the power of consumers to attack substandard care and bloated spending in a health-care sector that is “saturated with inefficiencies” because it pays “for volume, not value,” HHS Secretary Michael O. Leavitt told health reporters attending a national conference last week near Washington, D.C.

Leavitt said that insurers, employers who pay for insurance coverage and hospital administrators and boards all over the country would be poring over the data by mid-afternoon Friday, the day of the release. “You’ll begin to see hospital administrators’ compensation linked to this data,” he predicted.

For consumers, he said, the site will become “a Travelocity for health care,” referring to a site that helps travelers find the best deals on airfare and hotels.

The survey is “another critical piece” that adds to information for consumers, said Florida Hospital Association’s Kim Streit, vice president for health care research and information. She said she didn’t know why the average satisfaction rates were lower in Florida than for the nation as a whole.

While nearly all hospitals participated in reporting the data, since they faced the loss of 2 percent of their federal funding if they didn’t, not all agreed to let the government release the results for the public to see. HHS allowed the opt-out this time, since it was the first release of survey data, but will not do so for future patient-satisfaction surveys, the agency said.

More than 50 of Florida’s approximately 180 hospitals that participated in the survey opted out of publication, including some of Florida’s largest public and non-profit hospital systems.

The project, called the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Hospital Survey, is the first national publicly reported poll of patients’ views of their hospital stay. Patients were asked to complete it whether their care was paid for by Medicare, Medicaid or a private health insurance plan. Their participation was voluntary.

Consumers who have Internet access can compare the patient-satisfaction ratings for up to three hospitals at a time at the site. One potentially confusing characteristic of the site is the way it divides Florida hospitals into “northern” and “southern.” On the Gulf Coast, hospitals in Tampa and St. Petersburg are part of the northern list, while nearby Bradenton and Sarasota are part of the South. The Orlando area is considered part of the north. The Atlantic Coast is on the northern list all the way to Vero Beach; the south begins at Fort Pierce.

Carol Gentry, editor of Florida Health News, can be reached at Carol.Gentry@FloridaHealthNews or 727-410-3266.