You may not know, but Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt keeps an official blog to discuss healthcare. After the release of the website last Friday, Leavitt posted an entry discussing the new site and inviting comment.

The site assembles basic quality information collected from 2,500 hospitals and compares a series of quality measures, not only indicators of quality, but also price. Look up hospitals in your area. Some of the data won’t surprise you much, other parts will. In your comments, I’d appreciate hearing if you were surprised in any way about the comparative quality of hospitals in your area. This is a significant step forward, but my aspirations are higher in terms of the quantity, quality and accessibility of data.

Secretary Leavitt wrote that the release of this information should spur improvement and prompt hospitals to examine their processes for ways to make things better. He invited comments on the new website and the information that was released. A comment form is at the bottom of the entry, "Hospital Compare".