VA Quality Information on Care Compare

Care Compare is an on-line tool to find and compare different types of Medicare providers - like doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes. On Care Compare you can:

• Find information about providers and facilities based on your individual needs.
• Get helpful resources to choose your healthcare providers.
• Make informed choices about where you get your health care.

• Look at additional quality measures not shown on Access to Care. As much as possible, VA tries not to duplicate too many measures on both sites.
• View "overall star ratings" and "patient survey" star ratings for your VA medical center as well as for non-VA healthcare providers in your area. These star ratings are not shown on ATC.
• Compare the quality performance of your local VA medical center to the performance of other specific non-VA hospitals in your neighborhood. On ATC you can see how VA Medical Centers’ quality performance compares to the community overall, but you cannot see performance for individual non-VA healthcare providers.
• Learn about the quality ratings of non-VA health care providers in your area – useful if your VA medical center refers you to non-VA providers for care.
• Access additional details on measures, with the capability to download specific data sets.

• Most measures on Care Compare apply to Medicare beneficiaries (e.g., age 65 and older), while measures on Access to Care may include patients who are not eligible for Medicare due to age and other factors.
• There are some cases where the same measures are shown on both sites (e.g., legally required on Access to Care).

Where VA is unable to provide information for some measures on Care Compare, there are clear reasons, including:

• VA medical centers do not offer care services or functions related to that measure (e.g., obstetrics care).
• VA does not have the capability to collect certain information related to that measure (e.g., technical limitations that affect data collection).
• Not enough volume of data available to submit to Care Compare.