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Resources: Find a Facility

How to Choose Hospitals and Other Facilities (Joint Commission)
The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (the Joint Commission or JCAHO, for short) is an independent, not-for-profit organization that is the predominant standards-setting and accrediting body in health care in the United States. This resource includes a number of guides that help you consider the important issues in choosing hospitals, long term care, assisted living and other facilities and services.

Find a Hospital (U.S. News/American Hospital Association Directory)
The U.S. News and World Report Magazine provides information from the American Hospital Association on over 5,000 hospitals nationwide. You can search by hospital name, location or type of services that are important to you. The information retrieved includes links and maps to the hospital, its accreditation status and services provided, as well as numbers on hospital admissions, beds, and staffing. The U.S. News “Health” portal also provides access to their rankings of “Americas Best Hospitals.”

Find a Facility (Healthfinder)
Healthfinder is a gateway to consumer health information resources provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This resource enables you to find hospitals, nursing homes, health centers as well as programs, services and healthcare organizations from an alphabetical index of subject headings.

Find a Children’s Hospital (National Association of Children’s Hospitals)
From the National Association of Children’s Hospitals, this site provides profiles of member Children’s Hospitals from across the nation. Click on the Hospital Search button on the top right hand corner of the page to get to the search page.

Nursing Homes and Assisted Living (Medline Plus)
MedlinePlus brings together authoritative information for consumers from the National Library of Medicine (NLM). These resources provide an extensive list of references on nursing homes and assisted living including directories that help you locate homes and services.

Hospital Accreditation (Joint Commission)
This is another helpful resource from the Joint Commission (JCAHO), which evaluates and accredits more than 15,000 health care organizations and programs. Here you can check whether the hospital you are considering is JCAHO accredited as well as other quality awards they may have received.

Hospital Nursing Recognition Award (American Nurses’ Credentialing Center)
The American Nurses’ Credentialing Center (ANCC), an affiliate of the American Nurses Association, awards “Magnet” status to hospitals that satisfy a set of criteria designed to measure the strength and quality of their nursing. A “Magnet” hospital has demonstrated that nursing staff deliver excellent patient outcomes, have a high level of job satisfaction, experience low turnover rates and have appropriate grievance resolution.

Comparing Hospital Quality (U.S Dept. of Health and Human Services)
The Hospital Compare website was created through the efforts of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the Dept. of Health and Human Services, along with the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA), a public-private collaboration of organizations that represent consumers, hospitals, doctors and nurses, employers, accrediting organizations, and Federal agencies. This resource helps you compare the quality of care provided in the hospitals that agree to submit data on the quality of certain services they provide for a limited number of conditions including heart attack, heart failure or pneumonia.

Comparing Hospital Quality (The Commonwealth Fund)
The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation dedicated to improving healthcare, created this resource, WhyNotTheBest.org, to compare hospital quality. It incorporates data from the abovementioned U.S Dept. of Health and Human Services’ Hospital Compare website, as well as provides additional measures from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), which reports on hospital patients’ satisfaction with their care.

Comparing Hospital Quality (Leapfrog Group)
The Leapfrog Group is a growing consortium of major companies and other large private and public healthcare purchasers who currently provide health benefits to more than 37 million Americans in all 50 states. This group has banded together to encourage, recognize and reward health industry “leaps” in safety, quality and customer value. Their resource enables you to compare hospitals on their implementation of a number of scientifically validated quality and safety practices.

Comparing Healthcare Facility Ratings (HealthGrades)
HealthGrades is a for-profit healthcare ratings company that, in addition to providing ratings to consumers on physicians, also provides independent ratings and reports on 5000 hospitals and 16,000 nursing homes in the U.S. Their basic service that rates and compares hospitals is free. For a fee, you can also download their more comprehensive reports including additional information on cost and safety.

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Resources: Find a Facility