Fierce Healthcare: The New Hampshire's Commission of Healthcare Quality Assurance has established a campaign intended to foster safe hand-washing practices in hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers.

The guidelines for this program is prepared by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Their goal is to achieve 100 percent compliance on hand-washing rules and regulations.

Some features of the program:

• Making hand hygiene supplies accessible

A news item on KaiserNetwork.org looks at several states that have begun requiring hospitals to disclose prices paid for services - with three states being at the forefront of providing more information on hospital prices and how they can vary; including New Hampshire, Oregon and Massachusetts:

- New Hampshire is disclosing the median amount specific health plans pay hospitals or clinics for about 30 common procedures;

The following is a summary of legislation by state regarding the disclosure by hospitals of their hospital infection rates.

Arkansas

As reported in iHealthBeat today, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center's Web site provides data on the percentage of patients who experienced symptom relief after surgery and whether they would chose surgery again. Patients use hospital laptops to complete surveys that are used to compile the data. Physicians at the medical center said the Web site resulted in fewer surgeries because the decision to operate is based more on patient preference than surgeon preference.

As reported in iHealthBeat today: New first-of-its-kind Web site based on billing data from insurers enables New Hampshire residents to view how much they might pay different hospitals and physicians in the state for various medical procedures. New Hampshire is the second state in the country to require payers to provide billing data and is the first to use that data to create an online tool. Others states provide health care pricing information online, but the New Hampshire site is more detailed because it uses the actual negotiated rate that insurers pay, the Telegraph reports. The Web site, nhhealthcost.org, was developed by the New Hampshire Insurance Department. The New Hampshire Insurance Department plans to add more medical procedures and pricing information and to mine the billing data to develop different online tools. The department next year plans to create a tool to offer data that could help employers select insurance for their employees.