Say you want to buy a car. One of the first places you might think about going for ratings and reviews is Consumer Reports. For decades, the magazine has published reviews of all manner of consumer products.
You might not know it, but Consumer Reports also publishes reviews on hospitals and physician groups. Starting Wednesday Californians can access that information -- free -- on CalQualityCare.org, a website run by the nonprofit California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF). This site already features reviews of hospitals and nursing homes.
Launching just days after Jan. 1, when new insurance took effect for hundreds of thousands of Californians via the Covered California marketplace, the revamped site offers consumers information to help them choose hospitals, nursing homes and doctor groups.
"Making this information easy to digest for the consumer is so key," said Andy Krackov, senior program officer for CHCF. Previously, the foundation had maintained separate websites for hospitals and long-term care facilities. In this new partnership with Consumer Reports, CHCF has merged its separate websites to create a one-stop resource for comparison data. The site has no advertising.
While consumers might find it ideal to look up ratings on specific physicians, Dr. John Santa, the medical director of Consumer Reports Health, promptly pointed out the challenge in going to that level of detail. "There's 500 cars we rate. We rate 5,000 hospitals, but 900,000 physicians (in the U.S.) is daunting," he said. Still, the group your doctor practices in "is a big deal, because a lot of your care gets delivered" by others in the practice, not just other physicians -- but nurses and medical assistants, too.