“The US Department of Health and Human Services website, Medicare.gov’s Hospital Compare, seeks to provide patients with actionable, relevant information regarding the quality of the health care providers in their own area,” said lead study author Kyan Cyrus Safavi, at Yale University School of Medicine. Safavi and his co-authors wondered whether Hospital Compare’s ratings allowed patients to distinguish a top-performing hospital in a local area, and then “to make an intelligent data-driven decision.”

“Since it’s important to empower patients to make better decisions about where they seek care, we wanted to know more about how that process is really going—and what kind of data they really see,” he added.

On the Hospital Compare website, patients have access to data about a collection of surgical process of care measures from the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP), Safavi explained.

The researchers found that the nearly 3,000 hospitals across the US that reported SCIP data, generally performed well with little variation, making it difficult for patients to differentiate between hospitals in their region.

“The pattern held across many diverse regional geographic areas nationwide,” Safavi said. “Patients use this type of data frequently, especially when making decisions about elective or semi-elective surgeries. There’s a missed opportunity to provide those patients with more transparent and reliable information to better influence their decision-making.”

Measuring other processes of care, however, can help patients distinguish between hospitals, he said. “For example, what is the organization and safety of the operating environment, and how much attention is a hospital paying to post-surgical wound care? Hospital outcomes can also distinguish quality.”