MediQoC: A Data Driven, Hospital Quality of Care Portal for the Patient Community

In order to respond to recent changes in health services provision, where patients are members of a consumer driven healthcare system, we developed MediQoC (Medicare Quality of Care), a data driven web portal for Medicare patients and their caregivers. MediQoC grants access to personalized, data-driven information about hospitals, and quality of care indicators. Utilizing a Medicare claims dataset, the portal enables patients, caregivers and other stakeholders the ability to locate high-quality hospital services which are appropriate for specific symptoms and medical procedures. MediQoC provides to the user a list of eligible hospitals, and outputs statistics on hospital stay attributes and quality of care indicators, including the prevalence of hospital acquired conditions. Each hospital is ranked with a percentile rank score on the basis the aforementioned in-hospital attributes and quality indicators; the ranking results are visualized on maps via MediQoC-viz, the visualization module of the portal. A panel of three clinical experts evaluated the portal and provided feedback related to function, and data utilization and legal aspects.