Web sites to help you chose health care providers, medicines and health care facilities:
Florida Informed Patient
The Florida Hospital Association's Web site, www.floridainformedpatient.com, offers a variety of health care information resources, including a search function to find hospitals based on the types of services and location. The Web site also allows surfers to navigate directly to a hospital's Internet site.
The site provides checklists for patients to use when selecting a hospital, a physician or a health plan and gives quick links to a variety of health care sites providing quality and pricing information.
The site also serves as a pathway to a number of recognized Web sites providing information on physicians, health insurance companies, prescription drugs and general health information.
Information in choosing a hospital, understanding hospital bills, checking physician credentials, links to HMO pricing and quality, comparing drug pricing and how to avoid medication errors also can be found on the site, which will be updated as new resources become available.
Florida Compare
Created by the Florida Legislature, the governor's office and the Agency for Health Care Administration, www.floridacomparecare.gov provides consumers with the tools to compare hospitals, ambulatory (outpatient) surgery centers and health plans.
Florida Health Statistics
Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration has two Web sites dedicated to the state's health care consumer:
www.FloridaHealthStat.com provides health care information to assist consumers, health care professionals and researchers in making well-informed health care decisions and in researching the status of health care in Florida.
www.MyFloridaRx.com provides consumers with the retail prices of the most commonly used prescribed drugs by pharmacy across Florida.
For questions or comments regarding any of Florida's consumer Web sites, please contact Beth Eastman, Interim Bureau Chief of the Florida Center for Health Information and Policy Analysis at (850) 922-3803.
Nursing Home Compare
http://www.medicare.gov/NHCompare/Home.asp - Nursing Home Compare provides detailed information about the past performance of every Medicare and Medicaid certified nursing home in the country, searchable by name, location, type of facility and zip code.
Florida Nursing Home Guide
http://ahcaxnet.fdhc.state.fl.us/nhcguide/
The Nursing Home Guide Web site allows you to search for a nursing home by geographic region or by the characteristics of the nursing homes. When you view the information for a specific nursing home, you will see descriptive information about the facility, as well as the facility's performance on past inspections as represented by stars. Under the stars is a link "Inspection Details for this Facility," which will take you to a listing of this facility's deficiencies during the past 30 months. Clicking on any citation will take you to a fuller explanation of that citation.
