1. The Department shall establish and maintain a program to increase public awareness of health care information concerning the hospitals in this State. The program must be designed to assist consumers with comparing the quality of care provided by the hospitals in this State and the charges for that care.

2. The program must include, without limitation, the collection, maintenance and provision of information concerning:

(a) Inpatients and outpatients of each hospital in this State as reported in the forms submitted pursuant to NRS 449.485;

(b) The quality of care provided by each hospital in this State as determined by applying measures of quality endorsed by the entities described in subparagraph (1) of paragraph (b) of subsection 1 of NRS 439A.230, expressed as a number of events and rate of occurrence, if such measures can be applied to the information reported in the forms submitted pursuant to NRS 449.485;

(c) How consistently each hospital follows recognized practices to prevent the infection of patients, to speed the recovery of patients and to avoid medical complications of patients;

(d) For each hospital, the total number of patients discharged, the average length of stay and the average billed charges, reported by diagnosis-related groups for inpatients and for the 50 medical treatments for outpatients that the Department determines are most useful for consumers;

(e) The total number of patients discharged from the hospital and the total number of potentially preventable readmissions, which must be expressed as a total number and a rate of occurrence of potentially preventable readmissions, and the average length of stay and the average billed charges for those potentially preventable readmissions;

(f) To the extent that money is available for that purpose, for each hospital, the name of each physician who performed a surgical procedure in the hospital and the total number of surgical procedures performed by the physician, reported by diagnosis-related group if the information is available and by principal diagnosis, principal surgical procedure and secondary surgical procedure; and

(g) Any other information relating to the charges imposed and the quality of the services provided by the hospitals in this State which the Department determines is:

(1) Useful to consumers;

(2) Nationally recognized; and

(3) Reported in a standard and reliable manner.

3. As used in this section, “diagnosis-related group” means groupings of medical diagnostic categories used as a basis for hospital payment schedules by Medicare and other third-party health care plans.

(Added to NRS by 2007, 2350; A 2011, 1802, 2126, 2660)