NHQualityCare.org is a website which provides consumers with reliable, honest data about the treatments for heart attacks, heart failure, and pneumonia along with information related to preventing surgical infection.  The measures displayed represent those processes that have been scientifically proven to increase the chance that patients will have a positive outcome.

The goals of this website are to:

1. Assist consumers in becoming more informed about what they should expect from their providers and why those treatments are important, and;
2. Assist hospitals and clinicians by providing validated information on evidence-based measures of clinical care so they can see how they are doing relative to others in the state and themselves over time.  This information will also serve as a mechanism for sharing best practices.

All 26 acute care hospitals in NH submit data for this website.

The conditions were selected because they represent the most common causes of hospitalization. The processes to be performed for these conditions that are reported were selected because they are scientifically proven to increase the chance of a positive patient outcome.

The database includes ALL patients age 18 and over, regardless of who pays for the care.

All patients who have contraindications to this care are removed from the denominator, for example, patients with aspirin allergies.

The denominator represents all those patients who were medically eligible to receive the particular treatment. The numerator represents all those patients who actually received the particular treatment for which they were medically qualified.

For example:
Aspirin at Arrival
80%
8/10

This means that 10 patients were medically eligible to receive an aspirin on arrival to the hospital and 8 patients actually received it. If a patient is allergic to aspirin, that patient would NOT be part of the denominator. "0/0" means that no patients were medically eligible to receive that particular treatment.

For some hospitals, the numbers are small because they don't treat certain types of patients or they transfer them to another facility after stabilization. The reports will be updated quarterly and always reflect the most recently reported 12 month period. The most recent validated data available may not reflect a hospitals most recent process improvements.

The reports will be updated quarterly and always reflect the most recently reported 12 month period. The most recent validated data available may not reflect a hospitals most recent process improvements.

The data is collected from individual patient charts and submitted for entry into the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Data Warehouse. Our state's Quality Improvement Organization, the Northeast Health Care Quality Foundation, then validates these data. Some of this same data for New Hampshire hospitals and similar data for across the country can be found at Hospital Compare, hosted by CMS.

Hospital personnel review medical records and capture standardized data elements related to the measures that define the reported conditions. These data are entered into a standardized collection tool and submitted to the Quality Improvement Organization's (QIO) Clinical Data Warehouse. The submission of this data includes auditing procedures and edit checks, which assesses whether data submitted is consistent with defined parameters for sample size, outliers, and missing data. In addition, the QIO has a validation process with individual hospitals to ensure that the data are accurately abstracted from the patient medical records.

NHQualityCare.org is a dynamic resource that will be updated with additional measures as the scientific literature provides us with recommended processes that are proven to improve care and the information collected will be reliable, valid and relevant.

Yes, because the data is updated every three months, it would be difficult and costly to update paper copies of the reports. For those consumers who do not have computers at home, computers are readily available at public libraries and in hospitals where people can get help accessing the website.

Hospital quality information can benefit hospitals, health care providers, patients and their families. Hospitals in New Hampshire have always evaluated what they do and used that information to continually improve their care. This web site offers another way for hospitals to see how they're doing and learn best practices from one another. NHQualityCare.org also will educate the public on the type of care patients should expect from their providers and why those treatments are important.

If you 'click' on the hospital name on any of the reports, you will come to a standardized page that provides detailed information about that hospital and all of its rates. If you 'click' on the hospital name on that page, you will be sent to the hospital's website homepage. Some hospitals may provide a link to 'quality initiatives' and others will provide contact information for you to call and ask about their programs for quality improvement.