For the patient safety crowd – which is all of us, when we shop for medical services:

Cheryl Clark of Health Leader just posted this on Facebook, from this weekend’s Boston meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists
(AHCJ):

“For the first time, providers, payers, and patients now have an enormous searchable database containing documents detailing about 8,000 serious federal safety rule violations—many of which have caused serious patient harm or death—at about 1,000 U.S. hospitals since January, 2011.

“The documents, which resulted from federally authorized complaint investigations and are called “2567s,” were released over the weekend by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services [CMS] after a long-standing request from and collaboration with the Association of Health Care Journalists. The AHCJ has organized the document files on a searchable website on its site, http://hospitalinspections.org. …”

The whole article is here: http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/content/QUA-290217/CMS-Unveils-Hospital-Violations-Database