FAQs

Question: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has hospital information on their Web site that looks very similar to yours. What is the difference between your site and the federal site?

Answer: We submit the information that is on our Web site to an organization that forwards it to the federal agency. The information that is on our site is the most up-to-date possible. It is our understanding the most recent information on the federal Web site is up to six months older than ours. For example, we have information for Third Quarter 2008; the federal Web site has information from First Quarter 2008.

Question: There are other Web sites out there that rank hospitals or offer hospital report cards. What is the difference between your site and theirs?

Answer: Our Web site offers the most current information of any government or commercial Web site that reports hospital quality information. Also, Banner Health has chosen not to participate with Web sites that charge hospitals for publishing hospital-specific quality data.

Question: Your Quality Report shows your performance in nine areas. Why those specific areas?

Answer: As part of our Care Management initiative, we collect all kinds of data to determine how well we provide care. We focused on these areas because we had the data and we felt with concentrated effort, we could improve our care in these areas. Our scores in these areas have improved as we have focused our energy in improving our processes and policies in these areas.

Question: Can you give an example of that?

Answer:  In 2004, Banner Health Care Management began an initiative to improve care for heart failure patients. Heart failure is the leading cause of hospitalization for Medicare patients; 50,000 new cases of heart failure are diagnosed every year.

A team of physicians, nurses and other clinical staff from across Banner Health was created and they began gauging Banner Health's performance in caring for heart failure patients. They created ways to determine if patients were given thorough discharge instructions, if they received certain assessments and medications and if they were given advice about how to stop smoking -- all critical to improving the health of heart failure patients.

After collecting that data, the team came up with several different strategies for improvement. Those strategies included giving physicians and nurses more follow-up information on individual patients' outcomes; mandatory education about heart failure, more communication about heart failure as nurses and physician made their rounds and providing every heart failure patient with an action plan at discharge.

Since those strategies went into place in 2007, Banner Health's performance scores have improved.

Question: How did Banner come up the national average numbers?

Answer:  Banner Health used an average composite score from the CMS National Database. We published the most recent national data.

Question: The federal Web site has information for each hospital. You only have information for the entire Banner system, which has 22 hospitals across seven states. Why is that?

Answer: This is the first phase of Banner Health's plan to publish quality data online. During our second phase, we will begin to list individual hospitals.