Quality Healthcare Resources
Stay informed about the best hospital options for the care you need. These sites provide information about patient care, hospital quality and costs, and patient rights.
As a healthcare consumer, it's important to have access to facts that can help you make the best choices for your family. The informational websites below enable you to do just that.
El Camino Health uses these same resources to help us stay on top of today’s healthcare issues and benchmark our progress. We want you to be confident that the care you receive at El Camino Health is of the highest quality.
The California Office of the Patient Advocate
The Office of the Patient Advocate (OPA), in conjunction with California State’s Department of Managed Health Care, helps consumers access healthcare services and keeps them informed of healthcare quality. It compiles healthcare quality report cards for the state's largest health plans and medical groups, as well as complaint data reports with findings based on consumer complaints.
The Joint Commission
The mission of The Joint Commission is to continuously improve healthcare for the public by evaluating hospitals, inspiring them to excel in providing safe and effective care of the highest quality and value. Joint Commission accreditation and certification is recognized nationwide as a symbol of quality. The organization helps consumers find accredited healthcare organizations, and it also shares advice on how to be a smarter patient.
The Patient Care Partnership (American Hospital Association)
This plain language brochure informs patients about what they should expect during their hospital stay with regard to their rights and responsibilities.
Ratings Agency
This agency rates the quality of a hospital's patient care, safety and costs:
- Hospital Compare. This interactive website allows you to select multiple hospitals and directly compare their performance measurements around conditions such as heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgery and others. Consumers are able to make informed decisions about healthcare using this helpful apples-to-apples comparison.
Other Resources
In developing our goals for quality and patient safety improvement, El Camino Hospital has consulted these groups:
- National Quality Forum – A not-for-profit, nonpartisan, membership-based organization that works to catalyze improvements in healthcare.
- Collaborative Alliance for Nursing Outcomes – The leading provider of actionable information and research on nursing-sensitive quality indicators.
- National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators – Enables your hospital to compare measures of nursing quality against national, regional and state norms for hospitals of your type down to the unit level.
- Institute for Healthcare Improvement – An independent, not-for-profit organization helping to lead the improvement of healthcare throughout the world.
