National Ad Campaign Highlights Patient Ratings For More Than 1,000 Local U.S. Hospitals
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is launching the first national print advertising campaign focusing on the quality of care available in the nation’s hospitals. The ads, placed by HHS’ Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in the May 21 edition of 58 major daily newspapers, promote Hospital Compare (www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov), an easy-to-use website that helps consumers make well-informed decisions when choosing a hospital. The ads provide scores from two of the 26 quality and patient satisfaction measures on the website for a sample of hospitals in the newspapers’ areas. The 26 quality measures allow patients to better understand 10 key aspects of the patient experience. “These ads – and Hospital Compare – are intended to give consumers more information for making choices about their health care,” said HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt. “This brings us closer to meeting the goal of using new technologies to make the quality of health care services all across the nation more transparent to the public.” The newspaper ads, aimed at reaching areas covered by about 1,000 of the 4,000 hospitals included in Hospital Compare, invites readers to “Compare the Quality of Your Local Hospitals” and contains the following information: the percentage of patients at each hospital who always received help when they requested it, as reported by the patients themselves, and the percentage of patients at each hospital who were given antibiotics one hour prior to surgery, as reported by hospitals, along with the state average for each of these two measures.