Creative Health Labs

The positive correlation between hospital costs and quality was debunked long ago, nonetheless it's still interesting to look at the data in new ways. Here I've combined two different data sets: first I took the hospital charge data that was published earlier this year  by CMS and compared it against patient satisfaction or "perception" data from HCAHPS: Learn About Tableau Let me explain the graph. Each circle represents an individual hospital. The x-axis represents patient satisfaction as measured by the HCAHPS question representing the percentage of patients giving their inpatient visit a score of a "9" or a "10." The y-axis represents the average charge (the amount the hospital billed Medicare, not necessarily the amount the hospital actually got paid) by the hospital for management of sepsis, which I am using as a surrogate measure for hospital charges overall. I chose sepsis because it is a common medical syndrome for which we have lots of

Here are the twenty hospitals in America with the lowest recommendation rates by patients whom they serve, according to data from the official HCAHPS survey , accessed October 2013 from the Medicare data website : Learn About Tableau What is "HCAHPS"? HCAHPS is best explained by their own fact sheet : The HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) Survey is the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients' perspectives of hospital care... While many hospitals have collected information on patient satisfaction for their own internal use, until HCAHPS there were no common metrics and no national standards for collecting and publicly reporting information about patient experience of care. Since 2008, HCAHPS has allowed valid comparisons to be made across hospitals locally, regionally and nationally.  Why is HCAHPS important? The answer is "money". Again, from the fact sheet: HCAHPS and Hospital

Learn About Tableau According to the latest data I could find  (last updated July 2013) Alaska has the highest rate of Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infections (CLABSI) in the country. CLABSI is only one of many hospital acquired infections. Here is the brief explanation of the data from CMS : The Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) measures - state data. These measures are developed by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and collected through the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN). They provide information on infections that occur while the patient is in the hospital. These infections can be related to devices, such as central lines and urinary catheters, or spread from patient to patient after contact with an infected person or surface. Many healthcare associated infections can be prevented when the hospitals use CDC-recommended infection control steps. There are four main Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI) being measured: HAI-1-SIR. Centr