A DATA DRIVEN, HOSPITAL QUALITY OF CARE PORTAL FOR THE PATIENT COMMUNITY

Abstract

With the recent changes in health services provision, patients are members of a consumer driven health care system. However, the health care consumers are not presented with adequate opportunities to enhance their position in choosing high quality hospital services. As a result, the demand for active patient participation in the choice of quality and safe hospital services remained unaddressed. In this research work, we developed MediQoC (Medicare Quality of Care), a data driven web portal for Medicare patients, their caregivers and the health care insurance policy designers to grant access to data-driven information about hospitals, and quality of care indicators. The portal which utilizes the Medicare claims dataset enables the patients, caregivers and other stakeholders the ability to locate high-quality hospital services for specific diseases and medical procedures. MediQoC provides the users a list of eligible hospitals, and output statistics on hospital stay attributes and quality of care indicators, including the prevalence of hospital acquired conditions. It gives options for the users to rank hospitals on the basis of the aforementioned in-hospital attributes and quality indicators. The statistical module of the portal models the correlation between length of stay (LOS) and discharge status attributes in each hospital for the given disease. Finally, the ranking results are visualized as bar charts via MediQoC-viz, the visualization module of the portal. The visualization module also makes use of Google Geocoding API to locate in map the nearest hospital to user‟s location. It also displays the location, distance and driving duration to the hospitals selected by the user from the ranked result list.