Compare your local hospitals with new web-based tool

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has a new comparison tool on its web site.

Consumers can see how their hospitals perform on the care of patients with heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia and pregnancy. They also can compare nursing homes, labs and other types of health-care businesses.

Don’t expect too much from this tool yet. For example, there are no Spokane nursing homes listed for comparison. You’ll get more on nursing homes from a similar comparison tool on the Medicare web site.

In some cases, the JCAHO tool just tells you how well an organization filled out the paperwork. Sacred Heart Medical Center, the largest hospital here, found that out the hard way.

Heart attack patients are supposed to receive a beta blocker upon arrival at the hospital and that’s one of the standards JCAHO uses to evaluate a hospital’s care. But since Sacred Heart receives a significant number of heart attack patients as transfers from other hospitals, and since the hospital didn’t mark some of its heart attack patients who came from other hospitals as "transfer patients," and since the hospital documented that they had not received a beta blocker at Sacred Heart, the hospital ended up with a "minus" grade for caring for heart attack victims.