The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently included data on mortality rates at individual hospitals on its Hospital Compare Web site. The data cover mortality rates for three conditions-–heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia-–which are considered good indicators to determine a hospital's performance.

In 2001, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the Hospital Quality Initiative (HQI) to assure quality health care for all Americans through accountability and public disclosure. The HQI is intended to empower consumers with quality of care information to make more informed decisions about their health care, and encourage providers and clinicians to improve the quality of health care.

As part of the HQI, CMS created Hospital Compare – a consumer-oriented website that provides information on how well hospitals provide recommended care to their patients. On this site, the consumer can see the recommended care that an adult should get if being treated for the aforementioned conditions.

This is the first time that CMS has included mortality rates under the HQI. Similar efforts to publicize hospital mortality rates in the 1990s ran into problems due to criticisms over the weight given to individual hospitals' patient mix and characteristics. Since then, CMS has worked to find ways to report, with high confidence in the data, the mortality rates for particular conditions at any hospital.

NSBA believes that all providers and insurers should follow the lead of CMS in providing for greater transparency of health care services. Transparency is crucial to help consumers understand their own health care. At the very least, all providers should make publicly available, a plain-language list of the top 20 in-patient and out-patient procedures’ costs and risk-adjusted outcomes, to be updated annually and expanded until all procedures’ cost and outcomes are publicly listed.