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You may know a hospital by its general reputation, but is it really the best place to go for the specific type of surgery you need? And is it true you “get what you pay for” in health care? Do higher prices mean higher quality?
A recent article in the Dallas Morning News (Cities Unite To Negotiate Lower Health Care Costs) spurred the interest of MPIRICA Health Inc.
Mpirica provides a medical quality score for surgeries at 4,800 U.S. hospitals, using a proprietary method that leverages publicly released data about surgical outcomes and physicians at specific hospitals.
IMPIRICA comparative metrics enables healthcare consumers to be more informed and have greater peace of mind when choosing a hospital or surgeon.
“The MPIRICA Quality Score allows you, your family, and your physician to easily compare facilities and surgeons at the procedure level with a simple, three-digit number. The core of the score is a set of clinically driven, scientifically valid and weighted calculations about things that matter to patients who are having surgery.”
According to IMPIRICA, the MPIRICA Quality Score is an objective measure of medical performance based on documented medical outcomes. The score ranges from a low of 100 (sub-optimal care), up to a high of 800 (superior care), similar to a credit score. It individually measures hospitals and physicians, at the procedure level. Each provider may have multiple scores, based on the procedures performed.
MPIRICA combined the graph from the Dallas Morning News article (in green) and showed the associated MPIRICA Quality Scores for knee replacement surgery for each of the hospitals they called out (blue).
The results are stunning.
The opaque world of health care pricing and quality rankings historically has precluded consumer’s ability to choose their care using criteria other than “My neighbor says they are the best!” or “That’s the hospital my mother used back in 1954 for her colon cancer operation and she is still alive!”
You may know a hospital by its general reputation, but is it really the best place to go for the specific type of surgery you need?
