PLN 6: How to size up your Hospital?

After reading the article " how to size up your hospital," it gives you an insight on how to determine if a hospital is giving good quality based on certain criterias. For instance how consistently your local hospital gives heart-attack patients a kind of medication called beta-blockers, or what proportion of surgery patients get antibiotics an hour before surgery. These type of criterias gives off certain strengths and weaknesses within a hospital and shows us as consumers if we would like to indulge in becoming apart of that particular health care system or choose one that is better suited based  on better quality.

After getting on the leap frog website, I compared two hospitals based on that specific criteria to see which each strength and weakness was of each, of course accoring with the information provided. The two hospitals were CJW Medical Center- Johnston - Willis Campus in rich mond VA, and Anne arundel Medical Center.

Now, after just looking over the different criterias from first glance, it shows that Anne arundel Medical Center fully meets the standards for all of the categories  mentioned except for the heart bypass surgery, becasue it does not apply. It shows that this hospial has a lot of strengths to it.

Reviewing the information about CJW Medical Center Johnston- Willis Campus it  seems that the ratings are a bit less. For instance in the prevent medication errors, it shows one bar which indicates that the have a willingness to report the errors, but most likely they do not report which shows a weakness in the companys category for preventing medication errors. Also another weakness that this hospital shows is that it does not takes the necessary steps to prevent harm in the hospital, which is represented by one single bar as well.

After changing into different categories,it shows that the stronger hospital still remains to be Anne arundel Medical Center. Another criteria was based off of patient outcomes. The outcomes I chose was Heart bypass surgery, and abdominal aortic aneurism repair. Based on these choices it shows the strengths of Anne Arundel was still high in quality care. In the avoid harm category, it showsit had great progress. In the hospital of CJW Medical center, it still shows this hospital has a lot of weakness in the areas of preventing medication errors, steps to avoid haarm. But the strength based off the categories provides did show that the bypass surgery itself quality and cost were very good.


1.http://www.leapfroggroup.org/cp?frmbmd=cp_listings&find_by=zip&zip=20020&radius=100&cols=oa