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About us
January 2003
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Engineer testing cordless drills.
   HOLE PUNCH
To see how quickly cordless drills can make holes without bogging down, our engineers used the 41 drills in our tests to bore more than 500 holes in wood. The speediest could make a hole in under 2 seconds; the slowest took 22 seconds. Overall, drills ranged from excellent to poor.		   Engineer testing cordless drills.


Hospitals: Your right to know

The hospital "report cards" discussed in this month's cover story, Hospitals: How safe?, did not appear by accident. They are the result of an ongoing effort by consumer and employer groups and by labor unions to require states to collect and disseminate data that allow consumers to compare hospital quality. To date, 37 states have a mandate to provide some data on the quality of their hospitals.

Having this information can make a big difference to you. In New York and Pennsylvania, among the first states to release hospital-quality data, mortality rates for coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery dropped as hospitals used the results to analyze their own internal quality processes. So public report cards serve a dual purpose: They help consumers shop with their feet--as they might do when buying a car or a refrigerator--and they give hospitals and doctors an incentive and tools to look more closely at themselves.

Almost eight years ago, Consumers Union's Southwest Regional Office helped to pass a bill creating the Texas Health Care Information Council to collect patient-level data from Texas hospitals. The first report was released in October 2002 and is on the council's web site, www.thcic.state.tx.us. Updates will be released annually.

Texas was the first state to use a tool developed by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to provide hospital-to-hospital comparisons on specific procedures and medical conditions linked to quality of care. New York has issued a similar report, available at www.myhealthfinder.com. All the measures compensate statistically for hospitals that treat patients who have more serious health problems than others.

Texas hospitals and doctors had long resisted making that kind of information public. Disagreements among hospital and physician representatives about which data to use stalled its release for years. Concessions have been made along the way. For example, the Texas report has no information on physicians.

A California bill passed last year, sponsored by Consumers Union's West Coast Office, requires the state to collect and release mortality data on CABG surgery by both hospital and surgeon. (Some surgeon data can be withheld.) The bill, which was supported by doctors, also allows the state to collect and release physician data about other procedures and conditions relevant to quality of care. The first CABG report with hospital-only data is due in 2004. The first report including surgeon data is due by 2005.

BOARD MEMBERS ELECTED

Consumers Union members elected five incumbents and a former board member to the board of directors. Reelected were Clarence M. Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a nonprofit watchdog group, in Washington, D.C.; Barbara S. Friedman, senior vice president of finance and administration at the Association of American Medical Colleges, in Washington, D.C.; Sharon L. Nelson, CU board chair and director of the Shidler Center for Law, Commerce, and Technology at the Law School of the University of Washington, in Seattle; Dr. Joel J. Nobel, founder of ECRI, a nonprofit organization that tests and evaluates medical equipment, in Plymouth Meeting, Pa.; and Norman I. Silber, law professor at the School of Law at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, N.Y. Rejoining the board is Teresa M. Schwartz, professor of law emeritus at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Members of the 18-person board serve three-year staggered terms.