The Association of Health Care Journalists has revised and updated its Hospital Inspections website, which contains an easily searchable database of government inspection reports of hospital violations from January 2011 to the present.
Hospitalinspections.org includes the results of government inspections of acute-care hospitals, critical-access (mostly rural) hospitals and psychiatric hospitals resulting from complaints. The site allows searches by keyword, hospital, city and state, and can be limited to specific time periods.
The database now includes more than 24,000 inspection reports containing a combined 109,162 individual deficiencies. Most of the records include the inspector’s narrative about each deficiency. The database does not include reports of deficiencies found at long-term care hospitals, and it doesn’t include the results of most routine hospital inspections.
AHCJ uses a file from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to update this information. AHCJ launched the site in March 2013 following years of advocacy urging the government to release the deficiency reports in electronic format. Until then, reporters and the public had to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with CMS or state agencies to obtain the documents.
I’ll be demonstrating the inspection tool and showing you how to read the inspection reports on Friday, June 7 at Health Journalism 2024 in New York City. The panel will also cover other sources of hospital quality data.
