Patient satisfaction data goes live on national site

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Now patients will have their say.

A government web site that measures how well hospitals care for patients with certain conditions today posted results from patient-satisfaction surveys conducted in more than 2,500 hospitals around the country.

Patients were asked to rate communication, pain control, responsiveness, cleanliness, and discharge instructions during their hospital stays. The last of 10 questions asked if they would recommend the hospital to friends and family. Their answers are part of a project of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that allows users to see how different hospitals score on quality.

"In the old days, they talked about it over the fence," Karen Nelson, senior vice president for clinical affairs at the Massachusetts Hospital Association, said in an interview. "This is a more contemporary way to ask what it was like in the hospital last week. It's a way to quantify these things to make them more helpful to patients, and to hospitals so they can make improvements."

The ratings are the latest in a wave of public reporting that states, hospitals and trade groups have rolled out in recent years.

The Medicare site began posting 10 quality measures in 2005. It now lists 24 measures of how hospitals care for patients with heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia and how they prevent surgical infections. Deaths from heart attacks and heart failure are also tabulated, along with the cost of certains procedures, such as gall bladder removal.