Florida Compare Care
Overall Rating:
 GOOD

 

Overview
The Florida Compare Care website presents data and information to help you compare short-term acute care hospitals, ambulatory (outpatient) surgery centers, or health plans.The web site provides the following measures for select conditions:
  • Hospitalizations, length of stay, and charges (includes pediatrics)
  • Readmission rates by facility only
  • Mortality Rates
  • Complication / Infection Rates
  • Facility Profiles
  • Number of visits and charges (includes pediatrics)
  • Facility Profiles
What is it? Treatment profiles for specific conditions (length of stay, charges, frequency, etc) and facility profiles.
Who does it? Florida State government agency.
What is it based upon? Administrative data (billing data) supplied by Florida’s short-term acute care hospitals, ambulatory (outpatient) surgery centers, or health plans.
Web site: http://www.floridacomparecare.gov

 

Our Ratings
(Ratings are on a 1 to 5 scale, 5 is the best)
Usefulness

The state of Florida has been a leader in providing hospital performance data; being the first state in the country to publicly report infection rates and mortality rates in each hospital (November 2005) and the first in the nation to publicly report pediatric quality of care data (June 2006).

However, the data are not true outcomes data limiting the usefulness of head-to-head comparisons using this web site.

The web site solicits user feedback, use this link to complete their short survey to help improve this website.

Methodology

Administrative data are easy to collect – because hospitals use the data for payment. Using administrative as a surrogate for true outcomes data is problematic.

here are known problems with this approach. In fact, you can read some of them on the Florida Compare Care web site: data disclaimer.

Timeliness
The web site update frequency is unclear. Most of the data seems to be from early 2006.
Coverage

Every acute care hospital and ambulatory (outpatient) surgery center in Florida is tracked. Florida facilities with a small number of patients for a specific condition are not reported.

Accessbility

The data are available free of charge through the Florida Compare Care web site free of charge, without requiring user registration.

The report interface is a bit clumsy, but if you are facing a hospital care event in Florida the few extra clicks are worth the effort.

   

What You Need To Know

In addition to FloridaCompareCare.gov, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) has two other websites dedicated to the state’s health care consumer: 

www.FloridaHealthStat.com provides health care information to assist consumers, health care professionals, and researchers in making well-informed health care decisions and in researching the status of health care in Florida. 

www.MyFloridaRx.com provides consumers with the retail prices of the most commonly used prescribed drugs by pharmacy across Florida.

 

Evaluation Date: 2/4/07

Contact:

Florida Agency for Health Care Administration

2727 Mahan Drive
Tallahassee , FL 32308

(888) 419-3456