HealthGrades, Inc

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HealthGrades (NASDAQ: HGRD), incorporated in December 1995, provides objective ratings of hospitals, nursing homes and home health agencies in the United States. The Company also provides detailed information on physicians, including name, address, phone number, years in practice, information on whether they are board certified, whether they are free of state and federal sanctions and many other items. HealthGrades provides its clients with healthcare information, including information relating to quality of service and detailed profile information on physicians, which enables them to measure, assess, enhance and market healthcare quality. The company's clients include hospitals, employers, benefits consulting firms, payers, insurance companies and consumers.

The www.healthgrades.com Website is a healthcare information Website that provides rating and other profile information regarding a variety of providers and facilities. On this Website, Health Grades provides ratings or profile information relating to the healthcare providers, including over 5,000 hospitals with risk-adjusted ratings on 29 medical issues and programmatic ratings for maternity care and women's health; over 620,000 physicians in over 120 specialties, and over 16,000 nursing homes.

HealthGrades offers services to hospitals that are either attempting to communicate their clinical excellence to their internal staff, consumers and physicians or are working to improve quality. The Company also offers physician-led quality improvement engagements, and other quality improvement analysis and services for any hospitals that are seeking to understand why they have quality issues compared to other hospitals and how they can improve quality. It also provides basic and detailed profile information on a variety of providers and facilities. The Company makes this information available to consumers, employers, benefits consulting firms and payers to assist them in selecting healthcare providers. Basic profile information for certain providers is available free of charge on the Company's Website, www.healthgrades.com. For a fee, HealthGrades offers healthcare quality reports with respect to hospitals, nursing homes and physicians. These reports provide detailed information than is available free of charge on the Company's Website. Report pricing and content varies based upon the type of provider and whether the user is a consumer or a healthcare professional.

HealthGrades also provides detailed online healthcare quality information for employers, benefits consulting firms, payers and other organizations that license its Quality Ratings Suite of products, including Hospital Quality Guide, Physician Quality Guide, Nursing Home Quality Guide and Home Health Quality Guide. This information can be customized so that an employee can be provided with online access to quality data relating to healthcare providers within the provider network available under the employee's health plan. The Company competes with GE Medical Systems and Premier, Subimo, UCompareHealthCare and HealthShare Technologies.

Hospital Information

Over 5,000 hospitals with risk-adjusted ratings on 29 medical “issues” and programmatic ratings for maternity care and women’s health (as further described below). For 27 medical issues, the risk adjustment was based upon their methodology. For Gastrointestinal Procedures and Surgeries and Respiratory Failure, the risk adjustment was based upon the APR-DRG methodology developed by 3M Corporation. APR-DRG is an acronym for All Patient Refined Diagnosis Related Group. The APR-DRG methodology is a widely used severity-of-illness and risk of mortality adjustment tool.

Physician Information

Over 620,000 physicians in over 120 specialties.

Nursing Home Information

Over 16,000 nursing homes.

External Links

General

Reuters — 'HealthGrades Company Overview - Reuters'

HealthGrades

HealthGrades — 'Official website'

HealthGrades Press Releases — 'Company Press Releases'

News

Yahoo! Finance — 'HealthGrades. Company Profile - Yahoo'