High quality care can even save you money down the road. A well managed hospital will rely on procedures that can decrease the risk of medical complications.

An experienced physician is more likelY to diagnose problems without resorting to a slew of costly and unnecessary tests.

Much like the elusive data on medical costs. information on quality of health care providers has long been out of reach for consumers. But that is changing.

The federal government, employers and information services are looking to provide consumers with the information they need to find the best care their money can buy.

Take Two Aspirins
One way to assess quality is to look at how regularly a medical provider follows certain smart practices and procedures.

Immediately giving aspirin to heart attack patients, for example, can reduce the severity of an attack. Surgery patients given antibiotics within an hour of an operation are less likely to get infections.

A Web site run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lets people check how often hospitals follow these and other best practices for heart attacks, heart failure, pneumonia and surgical-infection prevention.

The site, hospltalcompare.hhs.gov shows how hospitals compare to national and state averages.

Another site that rates hospitals based on their medical procedures is hospltalcompare.hhs.gov 

Another site that reates hospitals based on their procedures is leapfroggroup.org There's information, for example, on hospitals computer use. Requiring computerized ordering of medicine (*)which cuts the risk of prescribing conflicting drugs, says Suzanne Delbanco,chief executive of Leapfrog Group, a Washington, D.C., organization that works with employers and other large buyers of health care.

There's also HealthGrades healthgrades.com  which measures hospitals based on mortality and complication rates.
The sit provides free data for (**) twenty eight (28) procedures or diagnoses, from back and neck surgery to partial hip replacements. More comprehensive reports, covering more conditions, cost $14.95 each.

Checking Out Doctors
There are significantly less data available to help consumers assess the quality of individual doctors, but enough to warrant a look.

Physician background checks, for example, are increasingly available online. Also, a growing number of sites let consumers rate their experiences with doctors.

The DocFinder function on the docboard.org  site directs people to state medical boards, where they can check out a doctor's history.

A typical background check will reveal a doctor's education, practice information and legal actions.

The healthgrades.com  site sells reports on doctors for $12.95 each. The reports provide much of the same information that can be found free, but also provide disciplinary actions culled from all across the nation, not just one state, says Scott Shapiro, a spokesman for HealthGrades.

Some doctors move to another state after they've been disciplined or sanctioned by one state's medical board, Mr. Shapiro notes. He says drug and alcohol abuse are common reasons that medical boards sanction physicians.

HealthGrades also incorporates consumer reviews into its reports, providing graphs that show how much other patients trust a physician and to what extent they would recommend the doctor to family and friends.

Another site that lets people rate and review physicians is ratemds.com  where users are asked to consider a doctor's knowledge, helpfulness and punctuality when providing a rating. Good doctors are marked with a smiley face. Poorly rated doctors are given a sad face. The results may give people a sense for a physician's bedside manner.

Article, from Wall Street Jounal insert in Sunday 6/18/2006 issue of Daily Herald was written by Kaja Whitehouse.

**words (added) and highlights by page author.