As a parent advocate for children with special education needs, or SEN, my family like many in our community tend to be a higher than average user of hospital facilities.  However, there is no meaningful information about the quality of care at hospitals, and the gap between the best and worst medical expertise and services at hospitals can be wide.  The Zubin Foundation's initiative, HospitalAdvisor, carries with it the promise to make transparent a number of key factors that predict excellence in hospitals, including patient experience.  We hope that this effort will help refocus hospitals that operate in an independent and isolated way to focus on quality control, integration, and coordination.

Our Quality of Care score and the quality of care indicators on HospitalAdvisor will be an additional source of information for patients. Experience in the US and elsewhere shows that patient experience surveys can provide important insights about the quality of care in the hospitals. Patients’ experiences are both important unto themselves and a very good proxy for broader quality of care.