Related Links
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
Use this site to compare dialysis facilities and home health agencies in your area, find suppliers of medical equipment or learn more about your Medicare coverage.
Healthgrades is the leading healthcare ratings organization, providing ratings and profiles of hospitals, nursing homes and physicians to consumers, corporations, health plans and hospitals. Millions of consumers and hundreds of the nation's largest employers, health plans and hospitals rely on HealthGrades independent ratings and decision-support resources to make healthcare decisions based on the quality of care.
Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO)
Established more than 50 year ago, the Joint Commission is an independent, not-for-profit organization. The Joint Commission sets the standards by which healthcare quality is measured in America and around the world. JCAHO evaluates the quality and safety of care for more than 15,000 healthcare organizations. Search in Quality Check for Joint Commission accredited organizations and their survey results.
Leapfrog, a coalition of Fortune 500 companies who are major purchasers of healthcare contracts, developed a public reporting initiative based on volumes and mortality. GHS has been monitoring and comparing performance in the Leapfrog focus areas since 2001.
The National Quality Forum (NQF) is a private, not-for-profit organization created to develop and implement a national strategy for healthcare quality measurement and reporting. In partnership with Medicare and other organizations, the NQF helped create the “Hospital Compare Report” Web site.
A Note About Researching Quality
Several industry and government organizations provide information about healthcare quality and some have proprietary reporting tools. The information these organizations provide can help you make informed, accurate decisions about healthcare quality.
Please keep in mind that different agencies and consumer reporting sites use different definitions, data sets, and time periods and have different (or nonexistent) ways of normalizing data for comparisons (severity adjustments). Therefore, comparisons between sources are not “apples to apples” and comparisons within a single source have to be carefully analyzed before accurate conclusions can be made (read the fine print!).