NEW YORK (AP) - HMOs in New York and New Jersey stack up well against national averages in patient satisfaction and other measures, but the level of care varies widely both within and between counties, according to a health care report card released Thursday.
The New York State Health Accountability Foundation rated health maintenance organizations in both states, and hospitals just in New York. Data on New Jersey hospitals will be added in the future.
'We have continually sought to provide the most valid, useful information to health care consumers and businesses in the region since we launched our first New York HMO report card in 1999,' said Theodore Will, chief executive of IPRO, a health care evaluation group that teamed up with the New York Business Group on Health to form the foundation.
Scores are broken down by county and provide a comparison between the health care services in a given area.
The report card rates HMOs by measures including use of imaging studies for low back pain; follow-up after hospitalization for mental illness; and numbers of board-certified physicians in a network. Data for hospitals includes average stay; average cost; and average Medicaid reimbursement for a range of procedures and conditions.
Some findings:
--New York's HMOs do as well as or better than the national average on 19 of 23 measures for which nationwide comparisons exist.
--For New Jersey, where 19 measures can be compared with national figures, the state's HMOs meet or exceed the national average on 10 of the 19.
-- In New York, hospitals gave antibiotics to patients within an hour of surgery 81 percent of the time -- an important procedure to reduce the risk of infection. But the performance of hospitals in the Bronx ranged as low as 65 percent and as high as 96 percent on that measure.
-- Individual HMO premiums in Manhattan varied from $501 to $1,292 a month. That was up from $475 to $874 a month in the previous year.
-- In Brooklyn, an asthma patient at Long Island College Hospital was charged an average of $12,430 after being hospitalized for a few days, while an asthma patient at Coney Island Hospital was charged an average of $5,911.
-- Also in Brooklyn, the rate of mothers undergoing Caesarean sections was 34.25 percent at New York Methodist Hospital and just half that -- 17.4 percent -- at Maimonides Medical Center.
Laurel Pickering, executive director of the New York Business Group on Health, said Hospitals should start explaining the disparities.
'We need to get the data out there in the public and start the conversation,' she said.
Brian Conway, a spokesman for the Greater New York Hospital Association, responded, 'It's very important for consumers to understand that these report cards are one of many sources of information they should consider when choosing or evaluating a hospital.'
The report card is intended primarily for employers but is available to consumers as well.
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© 2007 AFX News
