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Ever wonder how your state compares with the other 49 when it comes to quality of health care? Today, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality released a pile of data comparing how each state (and the District of Columbia) stacks up against the rest. As in past years, the states get mixed reviews.

Comparisons come in many different ways: AHRQ’s State Snapshots Web site lets you see how an individual state measures up to overall quality on a nationwide basis. There are also more specific metrics for the information-hungry.

Just for starters, we checked out New York. The data put the state’s quality of overall health care at a little worse than the national average, but it’s improved since the baseline year. (Most recent data years and baseline years vary by state and by what’s being measured.)

New York’s strongest measures included lower-than-average angioplasty deaths in hospitals. The state’s weakest measures included higher-than-average admissions for uncontrolled diabetes, and a higher percent of home health-care patients who had to be admitted to the hospital.

The strongest improvement within New York was in the area of cancer care; the state did a little worse at respiratory disease care, already its lowest-scoring clinical area.

Wisconsin, Minnesota and Massachusetts (in that order) scored highest across all measures in overall health care. But there’s still a lot of room for improvement — Wisconsin’s score was 69.20 out of 100 (New York scored 47.06). For what ingredients go into that meter score calculation, the details are here.

The data actually aren’t new; they were pulled from the 2008 National Healthcare Quality Report released by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in May. Health and Human Services today released its own state-by-state reports on the health-care status quo, highlighting what it said were specific reasons why each state needs health reform.

Image: iStockphoto

The rest is here: 
State of States in Health Care Isn’t Much to Write Home About