Accreditation

Report: Hospital comparison sites inconsistent

Accreditation Connection, September 21, 2007

Publicly available Web sites intended to compare hospital performance data have been found to contain inconsistent results and use inappropriate standards to measure quality, according to a study published in the Archives of Surgery.

The six sites included one government-run site, two non-profits, and three private sites. The study found that the government and non-profit sites had greater accessibility and data transparency, but the private, proprietary Web sites had more appropriate information. According to the study, approximately 113 million Americans searched for health information on the Web, and 29% of those searched for hospital- or physician-specific information.

Source: The Journal of the American Medical Association.

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