AHCJ has just updated the HospitalInspections.org website. The updated version adds 1,024 records of hospital inspection results, as recent as September. Most of the records show a detailed narrative of each deficiency among hospitals in the United States.
The website includes the results of government inspections of acute-care hospitals, critical-access (rural) hospitals and psychiatric hospitals resulting from complaints. The site now searches through 26,814 records.
It does not include reports of deficiencies found at long-term care hospitals, nor does it include the results of routine hospital inspections. The file came from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The site offers inspections since Jan. 1, 2011, searchable by keyword, city, state and hospital name. The website is open to anyone. AHCJ members can also download the latest data to perform their own searches and analysis.
HospitalInspections.org was launched in March 2013 following years of advocacy by AHCJ urging the government to release the deficiency reports in an electronic format. Until then, reporters and the public had to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with CMS to obtain the documents, a process fraught with delays. An update in 2013 added data on psychiatric hospitals.
The site is public but AHCJ members get the added bonus of being able to download the entire dataset and access to resources and tip sheets about how to best use the data in their reporting.
