Good Hospital Bad Hospital?

Most patients initially choose their primary care based on referrals from friends and family. Then the primary care doctor usually picked the specialists.  Many people will also consult online resources to find a doctor.

But what about hospital choices? It is the doctor who usually makes that call, but patients are beginning to advocate for themselves, with a growing number influenced heavily by media in every form. After all, most people do not experience complications in a doctor’s office, but in a hospital.

As we have surveyed, the majority of people did not even know that hospitals are being evaluated or scored.  This is the next step to patients and care givers taking a more active role in their healthcare decisions. Multiple online sites attempt to rate hospitals, many of them difficult to read and get relevant for a patient.  Different methodologies, some "game" the scores by paying to get better scores, some require multiple PhD’s to decipher or understand, some have outdated information, most can’t be found easily, etc., etc.  You start to see the immense challenge of finding relevant information that is easy to find and easy to understand. 

Now there is a site that clearly displays, in easy-to-grasp graphics, hospital information available for the consumer to make better choices and find their best facility based on national, standardized information.  Co-Founder Chad Erickson says, "We have worked in healthcare combined 30 years+, and unless you were in hospital management only a few people in our field that knew much about hospital ratings.  The overwhelming majority of healthcare workers don’t know where this data resides or how to interpret it for their own personal use.  Let alone the person who doesn’t work in healthcare full time. There had to be a better way to educate the public about these scores and actually provide some value to the people seeking answers.  Our mission is to provide transparency to any person so they can make educated decisions for them and their loved one’s care." 

The website: www.goodhospitalbadhospital.com allows users to hit the "easy button" and immediately search for hospitals near their current location without doing anything but pressing a button once on their smart phone, tablet, or personal PC.  Users can search by zip code, facility name, and the easy option of "near me".  The site then provides facilities that have been rated by The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CSM), the national Federal Governing authority for facilities that participate in these programs. More information can be found on CMS here: https://www.cms.gov/  This represents about 4,000 facilities approximately, which is most of all American hospitals.  Erickson states, "Transparency will not only help the consumers make more informed choices, but we also hope to have a positive impact on healthcare itself by bringing the attention to everyone the scores of these facilities."

Visit www.goodhospitalbadhospital.com/about-us for more information