Medicare wants you to compare 25 local hospitals

The federal government wants you to know how your local hospitals stack up, so today it is running newspaper ads in all 50 states -- including in the Boston Globe -- comparing local hospitals on two measures of quality and patient satisfaction.

In the Boston area, Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital -- Needham rated last in both categories. The hospital said today it has made improvements since the data were collected, from July 2006 through June 2007.

The numbers aren’t new, but the $1.9 million public push to get consumers onto the web site is.

“This is really trying to create a conversation over dinner tables in America and also in the community about how you choose a hospital,” Kerry Weems, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a teleconference with reporters. “The goal is to drive the quality of healthcare up, drive costs down, and give consumers choice.”

In March the federal survey of patient satisfaction listed 10 categories of care, from general questions about satisfaction to specific queries about things like noise at night. New England Baptist, Brigham and Women’s, Newton-Wellesley, and Emerson hospitals led the way with more than 80 percent of patients saying they would recommend the hospital to someone else. Massachusetts General Hospital didn't submit data because of technical differences in how it surveyed patients.

Today’s ads focus on the percentages of patients who received antibiotics an hour before surgery and always received help when they wanted it. At the Needham hospital, 70 percent of patients got antibiotics, compared with a state average of 89 percent. At Newton-Wellesley, 98 percent of patients got antibiotics, given to lower the risk of infection.

Half of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital - Needham patients said they got help when they asked for it, compared with a state average of 59 percent. Three hospitals -- Brigham and Women’s, Jordan, and Mount Auburn -- tied at 65 percent.

Penny Greenberg, director of healthcare quality at Beth Israel Deaconess-Needham, said a new protocol requiring patients to receive antibiotics before surgery in a pre-op area rather than in their rooms boosted compliance with the one-hour timeframe to 100 percent for the first three months of this year. Responsiveness to patients' needs has been addressed with a number of initiatives, from new discharge information packets to call lights that stay on until a nurse or nursing assistant takes care of a problem and turns them off.

"This is a direct response to our review of the latest data," Greenberg said.

Weems of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid encourages readers to go the Hospital Compare web site to get a fuller picture than the ads can convey.

“Nobody should choose a hospital based on two sample measures,” he said. “With this set of ads we want to drive people to the web site to make sure they know it’s there and make sure they know … there are differences in hospitals in quality and that this web site is one tool they should use in choosing that.”

The site now lists 24 measures and will add deaths from pneumonia in June and update patient satisfaction figures in July.