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The Springfield News-Sun is committed to covering health care in Clark and Champaign counties. For this story, the newspaper spoke to local medical professionals and regional experts about a new rating system for area hospitals.
On the web:
www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html
A new national rating system designed to help patients evaluate hospitals showed one Springfield center earned a perfect overall score, while another is working to show steady improvement.
The Ohio Valley Surgical Hospital, 100 W. Main St., earned the top five-star rating when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid released the most recent results earlier this year. The ratings were based on patient satisfaction surveys that focused on several factors, including how well pain was addressed, physicians and nurses communicated with patients, and medicines were explained.
Both the Springfield Regional Medical Center and Mercy Memorial Hospital in Urbana received three-star ratings. Officials at Community Mercy Health Partners noted other factors also need to be taken into account because each facility serves different kinds of patients.
Information on the federal website also cautioned patients should consider several factors when researching health care, and the patient experience is only one aspect of a hospital’s quality.
The federal site has included patient satisfaction scores in the past, but this is the first time the scores were shown as a five-star system to make it easier for patients to understand, said Steve Eisentrager, president at Ohio Valley. The hospital has emphasized patient satisfaction since it opened about six years ago, he said.
“Six years later, this five-star rating validates that we’re on the right track,” he said.
In recent years, Ohio Valley has implemented new spine and joint academies, where patients, their physicians and other health professionals meet before a surgical procedure to explain the process. That alleviates stress for patients, Eisentrager said.
Patients increasingly have more information available, allowing them to conduct their own research online and compare before purchasing medical services.
“It’s kind of like what you’ve grown to expect in other settings like retail,” Eisentrager said.
Springfield Regional has made incremental progress in its patient satisfaction scores each year, said Sherry Nelson, vice president of patient care services and chief nursing officer at the hospital. The most recent ratings are based on a period between July 2013 and June 2014, but she said the hospital monitors its own patient satisfaction scores regularly.
The ratings are helpful for residents but need to be taken into consideration along with other factors, Nelson said. For example, Springfield Regional runs an emergency room that saw more than 80,000 patients last year. Mercy Memorial also faces separate issues and operates an emergency room, hospital officials said.
Springfield Regional works with Ohio Valley and both hospitals share some of the same physicians.
The data can be helpful, but comparing hospitals based on the ratings alone isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, Nelson said.
“It’s year-old data that we’re looking at but it does give patients and families a place to start when they’re trying to make decisions about health care, and that’s the purpose of it,” Nelson said.
One of the changes Springfield Regional has made recently was asking nurses from the hospital floors to take patients from the ER, allowing nurses already in the ER to see more patients more quickly. Springfield Regional staff members also try to make it more comfortable for family members who want to stay overnight with patients.
There are numerous websites and companies that rate health care and each have slightly different ways to evaluate physicians and hospitals, said John Palmer, a spokesman for the Ohio Hospital Association. The organization doesn’t analyze the ratings systems in part because there are so many, and because each organization bases its evaluation on different metrics, he added.
The ratings can be helpful, but patients should also take other factors into consideration when choosing a health provider, Palmer said. That could include calling patient advocates at various hospitals and visiting facilities in person.
Other issues, such as the type of insurance a patient has and how close patients live to various facilities can also affect how a patient chooses and evaluates hospitals, he said. Patients can also seek referrals from primary care physicians.
“There’s a lot of health care information out there, and patients are encouraged to explore all the options and take time to see what’s out there,” Palmer said.
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