Hospital Comparison

Many people are interested in how their local hospital or hospitals are performing and are interested in a grading system that will allow them to evaluate the level and safety of patient care that is being provided (medicare.gov). On the Medicare website, http://medicare.gov/hospitalcompare, consumers are able to evaluate this information. This site provides information on several aspects of care including timely and effective care, use of medical imaging and readmission complications and deaths (medicare.gov). This paper will look at comparing Platte Valley medical center in Brighton Colorado, with Columbus community hospital in Columbus Nebraska. Both these hospitals are smaller facilities and are acute care hospitals. The comparison of these two hospitals will be in the category of timely and effective care. First a comparison will be done on timely and effective care for heart attack care. The next comparison will be conducted on Heart failure care. The comparison will look at these two similar hospitals and assess how effective and timely the care is in these two areas and will also compare them to the national average.
The first subcategory to compare will be “Outpatients with chest pain or a possible heart attack who received aspirin within the first twenty four hours of arrival or before transferring from emergency department (medicare.gov). This is an important measure to look at as there is evidence based practice and studies that indicate patients who received aspirin within 24 hours of a heart attack had 23% reeducation in vascular death then those patients who did not receive the aspirin (Maxwell, 1999). This is correlated to a decrease in death by 25 per every 1000 (Maxwell, 1999). In this category, Platte Valley Medical Center administered aspirin to 100% of all patients within 24 hours of symptoms of possible heart