Hospital Compare

So instead of doing my reading for my project management class (only 5 more weeks of school), I was on HootSuite seeing what was going on in my Twitter world.  On my business account @janetlsameh I follow 275+ folks from all over the world. In a 30 minute period I can see tweets that  range from complaints about local barrista’s to comments on macroeconomics trends.  Most of the commentators I follow touch healthcare, so the majority of  what I see falls within that realm.

Two unrelated tweets caught my eye today.  The first was from Atul Gawande linking to an blog post from the Atlantic.  The article talked about Todd Park.  For those who do not know about Todd, he is the chief technology officer of HHS, and has the idea to harness the power of  HHS data to spur innovations that improve the nation’s health and welfare.   One of the new tools that uses the HHS data, is  Hospital Compare, a website that contains detailed quality and patient satisfaction information from hospitals across the country.  The second tweet was from Mark Harmel, linking to a blog post from e-Patient Dave (Dave deBronkart) where Dave shares his experience of using Hospital Compare to choose which hospital to take his wife to when she had a foot problem.  Dave talks about how instead of automatically going to their default hospital an hour away, the deBronkarts decided to use Health Compare to choose a much closer hospital.   And it worked out fine.

e-Patient Dave’s experience shows that Todd Park’s vision is starting to work.  Granted Dave is a noted patient advocate and a VERY educated consumer of healthcare, but as more applications like Health Compare start to become accessible to consumers, it will begin to impact choices that patients make. e-Patient Dave’s case would not be a lot of revenue for the default hospital, but it impacted the relationship the deBronkarts had with it.   Instead of always going to one hospital, the deBronkarts, now have options.

Thanks to Todd Park, the data is out there. Hospital and health systems who don’t understand the impact that having the HHS data in an online patient friendly platform need to get up to speed quick.  Consumers are used to going to sites like Yelp or travel sites to see feedback on hotels, restaurants and the like.  Once they learn there is a place they can compare quality data and patient satisfaction scores for their local hospitals, they will use that to make healthcare decisions as well.