Comparison tools
Consumer tools for gauging the safety and quality of care
There is not a single source of information consumers can use to guide their choice of physicians or health care facilities based on quality and safety concerns. However, several organizations try to offer some help to consumers by assigning scores to providers based on quality and/or safety measures. The information is not complete, but can be helpful when comparing health care providers for a planned procedure or a hospital or nursing home stay.
Hospitals | Nursing homes | Surgeons
Hospitals
Hospital Safety Score: The Leapfrog Group gives hospitals a letter grade – "A" for the safest places to get care through "D" for substandard scores on safety measures – and allows consumers to compare the safety scores of hospitals in their local area. The data used for the grades voluntarily reported by the hospitals and is not independently verified.
Hospital Compare: The U.S. government's Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services also rates hospitals and allows consumers to compare the quality of up to three hospitals at a time.
Nursing homes
Nursing Home Compare: Here you can compare up to three nursing homes and learn more about quality concerns, staffing, and inspections. This website is sponsored by the federal government's Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Nursing Home Inspect: Sponsored by ProPublica, a non-profit news organization, this site compiles reports from inspections of nursing homes and resulting fines. You can search for an individual nursing home by name or look at all of the nursing homes in a particular city or town.
Surgeons
Surgeon Scorecard: Issued in 2015, this is one of the first attempts to rate individual doctors based on outcomes. You can search for the name of an individual surgeon and see if his or her patients experienced a low, medium or high rate of complications after each of six common surgical procedures. Hospitals' surgical complication rates for these same procedures are also available. Not all surgeons are assessed. Data is limited to doctors who performed at least 20 of the named surgeries on patients covered by Medicare between 2009 and 2013.