Web site gives patients chance to compare hospital options

By Marshall Allen

Thursday, March 19, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Nevada consumers have a new tool to make more informed choices about the state’s medical facilities. The new state Web site www.nevadacomparecare.net allows consumers to see how many types of procedures various facilities have performed, their charges and the average length of stay per patient.

The site is in its first phase and is still under construction, but information on dozens of diagnoses is available for the years 2005 to 2007.

The site is being developed by UNLV’s Center for Health Information Analysis from data gathered from hospitals and surgery centers. It does not include the outcomes of procedures, mortality data or infection rates, but allows consumers to see for each facility the number of cases per diagnosis, gross charges per case and average length of stay. Data can be viewed specifically by type of payer, age group and patient’s gender.

For instance, a pregnant woman looking for the least expensive hospital for a vaginal birth without complications would find great variation in how much Clark County hospitals charge for procedures. The information is of somewhat limited use because the published charges don’t necessarily reflect the actual cost to perform the procedure, or how much the patient or insurance companies actually pay. The Web site says University Medical Center would charge $4,091 per day for the delivery, compared with $6,939 at St. Rose Dominican Hospital’s Siena campus and the Clark County average of $5,134.

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For the ninth consecutive year, Nevadans are smoking less, and today only about one in five Nevada adults smokes cigarettes, according to federal statistics.

A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report showed that 21.5 percent of Nevada’s adults were smokers in 2007, down from 22.2 percent in 2006 — the year Nevada voters passed the Clean Indoor Air Act, which restricts smoking indoors in public places — and 30.4 percent a decade ago.

The CDC said cigarette smoking in the United States costs about $193 billion in direct health care expenditures and productivity losses annually, and leads to about 443,000 premature deaths.

The national median smoking rate was 22.9 percent in 1998 and 19.8 percent in 2007. Among the 50 states, Nevada ranked 16th for the highest rate of smoking.

Smoking was highest in Kentucky (28.3 percent), West Virginia (27 percent) and Oklahoma (25.8 percent). It was lowest in Utah (11.7 percent), California (14.3 percent) and Connecticut (15.5 percent).

The CDC expects more smokers to make an attempt to quit after April 1, when the federal tobacco tax will increase from $0.39 to $1.01 — the largest bump in history.

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Public anxiety over avian influenza, also known as bird flu, has died down in recent years, but that’s more a reflection on the media tiring of the story than any lessening of the threat posed by the disease, according to a national public health expert.

“We assess these threats on a daily basis and avian flu is still at the top of the list, the single most dangerous pathogen on the face of the earth because it has a mortality rate of 60 percent,” said Dr. Scott Dowell of the CDC’s global disease detection program.

By comparison, the mortality rate for normal influenza is far less than 1 percent.

Since 2003 the disease has infected nearly 400 people in more than a dozen countries in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.

Las Vegas could be more susceptible to bird flu because of its large number of international visitors. It is believed the disease can be passed from one person to another, but it’s “totally unpredictable” when that would happen, he said.

“The fact that it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t give us any reason scientifically to expect that it won’t happen,” Dowell said.