Our Commitment to Quality and Transparency
Measuring, Analyzing and Improving Care
How do patients and consumers make informed choices about a doctor or hospital?
Governmental and other regulatory agencies are helping consumers make informed healthcare decisions by providing readily available outcome information. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and The Joint Commission require all hospitals to report their performance measures by submitting data on processes of care. These data are updated quarterly on CMS’s hospital compare web site, hospitalcompare.gov. Beginning January 2010, the Ohio Department of Health will also provide quality outcomes information for patients on their website, odh.ohio.gov.
While performance measures are important, they only reflect certain process measures such as whether a patient received an aspirin when he or she reported to the emergency department with chest pain. Patients and consumers are also encouraged to ask about clinical outcomes data such as survival statistics, infection rates and functional outcomes to get a broader picture of care. Many of these details are available in our Outcomes Books, also provided on this site.
A review of clinical and treatment outcomes data should also provide important information about experience and case complexity. In general, the more experience the better the outcome. And hospitals with high case complexity tend to care for patients with the most complex problems.
Cleveland Clinic is committed to delivering high quality, safe care and to making its performance measures and outcomes available to patients and the public.
Our Quality & Patient Safety Institute works collaboratively with healthcare providers across our health system with the goal of continuous improvement and sharing best practices to provide safe, effective care to our patients.
On this website, you can review updated performance measures as well as the programs we are putting in place to make consistent improvements.
