Hospital Performance Profiles

The California Health Care Coalition (CHCC) has licensed the Select Quality Care (SQC) Professional tool, developed by WebMD Quality Services. The SQC tool integrates hospital discharge data reported by California hospitals to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) with over 195 hospital performance measures developed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the National Quality Forum, the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations and other entities concerned with quality measurement, reporting and improvement.

CHCC uses the SQC tool to produce reports for its members comparing the quality and costs of California general acute care hospitals in 5 regions of the state, including Los Angeles County, the three-county Modesto area, the four-county Sacramento area, San Diego County and the six-county San Francisco bay area. CHCC also uses the SQC tool to examine and compare the performance of hospitals within hospital systems, including Catholic Health Care West, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, Scripps, Sharp and Tenet Health Care.

CHCC reports are based on patient death rates, the rates at which patients experience preventable and often costly complications, average length of stay and average per patient charges for almost any type of medical or surgical admission.

CHCC chose the WebMD SQC tool because it applies the most widely accepted risk-adjustment methodology (3M APR-DRG) in use today. This methodology adjusts for differences in the age and illness severity of each hospital’s patient population. Risk-adjustment enables valid performance comparisons among hospitals even when some have patients who are much older or sicker than others.

The SQC Professional tool is used by many health plans to profile their contracted hospitals on quality and costs, identify under-performing hospitals, prepare for contract negotiations with their contracted hospitals and develop pay for performance initiatives.