Hospital Compare has information about the quality of care at over 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals across the country including Stony Brook University Hospital (SBUH). You can use Hospital Compare to compare the quality of the care provided at SBUH with other hospitals. 

The website can be accessed by going directly to http://www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/. Once on the Hospital Compare site, users can find hospitals by: 

  1. ZIP code
  2. city, state
  3. state
  4. name 

After selecting the SBUH or other hospitals of interest, you can examine information about the quality of care provided for the following aspects of healthcare:

  • Hospital Compare overall rating: Summarizes approximately 60 measures of quality shown on Hospital Compare into a single star rating, making it easier to compare hospitals side by side.
  • General information: Name, address, telephone number, type of hospital, and other general information about the hospital.
  • Survey of patients’ experiences: How patients recently discharged from the hospital responded to a survey about their hospital experience. The survey asked questions such as how well a hospital’s doctors and nurses communicated with the patient.
  • Timely & effective care: How often a hospital gives recommended treatments for certain conditions, such as heart attack, stroke, influenza, and blood clots, how quickly recommended treatments are administered, and how often a hospital follows best practices to prevent surgical complications.
  • Complications & deaths: How likely it is that patients will suffer from complications while in the hospital or after having certain inpatient surgical procedures, and how often patients died within 30 days of being in the hospital for a specific condition.
  • Hospital returns: Whether patients discharged from a hospital stay returned to the hospital within 30 days, and how much time they spent back in the hospital.
  • Use of medical imaging: How a hospital uses outpatient medical imaging tests (like CT scans and MRIs).
  • Payment & value of care: Whether the payments made for patients treated at a particular hospital are less than, no different than, or greater than the national average payment.