The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has opened a new web page entitled Hospital Compare, this week. The web page will display actual hospital death rates for heart failure, heart attack and pneumonia patients.

The director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Harlan Krumholz, said that the death rates "provide insights into where hospitals are compared to where they should be."

The reports about death rates as “worse than average” aren’t working at all as they don’t give any concrete result. These death rates will held account for every dead patient and the reason of his death. The CMS said that the board members and the community should be interested in their hospitals’ performances.

Of course that the reports will be made according to the patients’ age as to discover what caused the death. Other information that will be taken into account for the death rates are current or previous heart problems, existing conditions like diabetes or asthma, for example. Deaths are counted if the patient died after 30 days of admission into hospital.

A horizontal bar on the statistics will show the range into which the actual rate could fall, so because of the small number of heart failure and pneumonia patients, each figure is accompanied by an interval estimate.