How to Find the Best Hospital

Information on hospital costs is very limited; most of the Web sites below only provide data about the quality of select procedures offered at various institutions. There are basically three kinds of resources: those provided by state or federal governments, private consortiums and insurers. You will need to check out all three to get the best picture possible of a particular hospital.

Government Sites

The most often cited government source is the Hospital Compare tool offered through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. This Web site shows how often a provider gives recommended care for a limited number of procedures at hospitals nationwide: heart attacks, heart failure, pneumonia and surgery care/infection prevention.

You can search by the name of the hospital or by location. (Oddly enough, you can't sort results for the best hospitals, either on this site or any of the others that I reviewed.) I found the table view easier to read than the graph format. Look for a hospital with a large number of patients treated for the procedure with a high rate of providing the recommend care.

My guess is that the information for pneumonia and surgery care will be the most useful, since you probably won't have time to check into hospital quality when you are having a heart attack.