GUIDE TO HOSPITALS AND DOCTORS

I've written before that people don't have ready access to information about how good their local health care system and its components are and today I found one source that seems to provide some of that information: Healthgrades.

Of more interest is a study of hospitals based on Medicare data:

HealthGrades identifies patient safety incidence rates among Medicare patients at virtually all of the nation’s 5,000 nonfederal hospitals.

This I found most interesting:

From 2006 through 2008:

• There were 958,202 total patient safety events affecting 908,401 Medicare beneficiaries which represents 2.29% of the nearly 39.5 million Medicare hospitalizations (see Appendix C).

• These patient safety events were associated with nearly $8.9 billion of excess cost (see Appendix E).

I thought the excess costs would be much higher.