Research Hospitals with
Subimo's Healthcare Advisor™

In keeping with our mission of providing enrollees with useful health care information, GIC enrollees have a tool for doing their own research about area hospitals. Subimo's Healthcare Advisor, provided to the GIC by UNICARE, includes condition- or disease-specific hospital comparisons based on the following criteria:

· Number of patients treated
· Complication and post-operative infection rates
· Public perception
· Hospital profiles

Enrollees about to have a procedure can use this information in conjunction with other resources, such as patient safety measures reported by hospitals to the Leapfrog Group. Another resource is HealthGrades, providing free objective ratings and in-depth profiles that allow consumers to evaluate and select providers based on quality. Also be sure to see other tips found on this website.

Subimo's Healthcare Advisor provides information about dozens of specific procedures - information such as questions to ask your doctor and the types of risks you face, as well as your surgical and non-surgical alternatives - that you can review prior to having surgery.

None of these tools, including Subimo's Healthcare Advisor, should be considered advice or a recommendation by the GIC; these tools are for information purposes only. Always ask the advice of your physician on important health care decisions.

How to Access the Healthcare Advisor™ Hospital Research Tool

1. Follow this link to leave the GIC's website and go to the Healthcare Advisor
2. Read the Terms of Use, and then click "Yes" if you agree to the terms. Note that you need to check both boxes.
3. Enter GIC as your username.
4. Enter the correct password. You can find the password in the GIC's "For Your Benefit" newsletter and in the GIC's "Benefit Decision Guide".

What Is Subimo's Healthcare Advisor™?

The Healthcare Advisor provides decision support tools that help consumers evaluate their health care options and make informed health care decisions. It aggregates, organizes, and models the best, most current information about hospitals so that GIC enrollees and family members can make informed decisions about their medical care. We know that GIC enrollees want access to quality care and are concerned about medical safety and outcomes. We also know that they want to be involved in the decision-making process to determine the right care for themselves and their families.

The proprietary tool and decision support algorithms were developed by Subimo, a company whose sole focus is to help people become more informed health care consumers. You are able to compare hospitals in your area to help select the hospital that best fits your needs and preferences. You can see how hospitals stack up against each other in nearly 90 different categories of care. You choose the factors that are most important to you, and the Healthcare Advisor does the rest.

How the Healthcare Advisor™ Works

Hospitals are required to report certain information to various state and federal agencies. Other companies have collected data on hospitals, including consumer preferences for a particular facility and data that hospitals themselves have reported to organizations such as the Leapfrog Group. Subimo assembles all of this data into a frequently updated database - the Healthcare Advisor - and makes sure that the most important data are available for you to evaluate. You select a procedure, enter a ZIP code, indicate how far you are willing to travel for care, and then rank the selected measures by importance:

· Number of patients treated by the hospital for your selected procedure
· Whether complications and post-operative infections are within expected ranges
· Public perception
· JCAHO accreditation
· Teaching status
· Availability of high-tech services and specialized treatment and recovery units.

In seconds, the Healthcare Advisor generates an individualized report that compares hospitals across the key measures you have selected, plus a host of supplemental data available about the hospitals, for example, the patient safety measures reported by hospitals to the Leapfrog Group.