How to compare health agencies

When you are looking to buy a car, computer or coffeemaker, you can learn about the reliability, features, benefits and shortcomings of a range of products through Consumer Reports, JD Power, and others. Now you can also get some information on nursing homes, home health agencies, hospitals and dialysis centers. Thanks to the health care reform law, more quality measures and transparency will be available. The measures of quality are not perfect — in fact, some may argue that they are very imperfect — but they give us more information about a facility or service, a peek under the covers. Don’t be misled by nice furniture and pretty curtains. What matters in your care is how it affects your health, but that can be impossible for an individual to access without data. Selecting a nursing home for a parent or a hospital for your surgery can be a challenging, emotional decision. A visit to a nursing home will give you some information, but lovely décor can camouflage more important characteristics. Medicare and the Florida Agency of Health Care Administration have put key quality information at your fingertips. Check out medicare.gov/quality-care-finder/index.html for information on how nursing homes, hospitals and other services compare.

Put in your Central Florida ZIP code and you will find not all nursing homes are the same. The Central Florida nursing home overall scores range from 1 (the lowest) to 5 stars (the best). The site also gives scores based on the onsite inspection, self-reported staffing ratios and quality measures. The staffing rating reflects the number of nurses and nursing assistants available per resident, adjusted for the complexity of residents’ needs. The quality measures are a composite of 19 measures nursing homes report to Medicare each year. These include quality indicators such as the percent of patients with bedsores, depression, worsening health status and weight loss. Both for-profit and not-for-profit facilities rank among the top three Central Florida nursing homes.

You can also compare home health agencies at medicare.gov/homehealthcompare/search.aspx. This will let you select three agencies at a time to compare. The site gives an overall score for the agency, along with Florida and national averages. It also gives information on several indicators of care quality, such as the percent of patients who have an unplanned hospital admission, the percent of patients who improved, and whether or not the agency staff is likely to educate patients and their families on medications.

On the Medicare website you can also compare hospital patient satisfaction rates and outcomes, including readmission rates. The outcomes are compared to the national average, telling if the hospital is comparable, better or worse than average. The website also has information on how many specific procedures, such as cardiac bypass surgeries, were done for Medicare patients at the hospital.

Additionally, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration operates floridahealthfinder.gov, a portal to prescription, hospital, health plan, physician, hospice and nursing home information. You can check out prices for many common prescription drugs at myfloridarx.com. Select your county, city and medication. Smaller communities, like Maitland and Winter Park, have fewer pharmacies and fewer drugs listed, so you may want to look in the Orlando information.

While the quality measures have shortcomings, it is often said, “what gets measured gets done.” Hospitals, nursing homes and home health agencies strive to be seen as the best place to get care. Now health care consumers have useful, practical information for making health care decisions. The nicest billboards or community event should not persuade you; get the facts on what really matters.

Maitland resident Nancy Rudner Lugo is a nurse practitioner and president of Health Action, offering workplace health consulting and nurse coaching. Visit www.healthaction.biz