Dive Brief:
- U.S. News & World Report, which also publishes Best Hospitals and Best Children's Hospitals, has announced that Kaiser Permanente and Intermountain Healthcare will participate in their new U.S. News Hospital Outcome Data Disclosure Program.
- Under the program, participating healthcare organizations can submit data that exceeds that which is available through Medicare's MedPAR database directly to U.S. News for their dataset.
- This new initiative aims to gather data to more thoroughly evaluate hospitals so that healthcare consumers can identify the hospital that best fits their needs.
Dive Insight:
The program is open to any hospital with significant data absent from MedPAR as a result of a large share of commercially-covered patients of Medicare age at their facilities. The Hospital Outcome Data Disclosure Program provides a way for U.S. News to include the missing data from those patients in its analysis.
The new ratings, set to be released in May, will evaluate hospitals on common, high-volume inpatient procedures and conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart bypass surgery, congestive heart failure, hip replacement and knee replacement, the company says.
"It's important for consumers to have access to comparative data when making decisions about their healthcare, and we are pleased that U.S. News & World Report has determined a way to better include outcomes from value-based organizations such as Kaiser Permanente in its new ratings," Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO Bernard J. Tyson said in a prepared statement.