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“Consumer Reports announces a major expansion of its work in the health care world, with the launch of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center, which this week will add rankings for hospitals, and eventually other health care providers to its ratings of health-related products, treatment options, natural medicines, and drugs.

John Santa, MD, former medical director for Health Projects at the Center for Evidence-based Policy at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is the director of the new Health Ratings Center.

The first undertaking of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center is a new web tool, created in conjunction with the Dartmouth Atlas Project, that will allow consumers for the first time to compare treatment approaches among hospitals for nine serious chronic conditions. The tool, available at www.ConsumerReportsHealth.org, ranks nearly 3,000 hospitals revealing sharp contrasts in how much time people with serious chronic conditions spend in the hospital and average out-of-pocket costs.

“The Health Ratings Center will provide consumers with independent, fact-based information and advice about how to get the best care,” said Jim Guest, president of Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports. “Consumers can trust that our ratings are free of any outside persuasion or bias because we do not accept advertising and all of our employees are held to a strict conflict-of-interest policy.”

Dr. Santa is well-known for the leading role he played in the Drug Effectiveness Project (DERP), based at OHSU, which develops evidence-based reviews that evaluate and compare prescription medications. The DERP drug reviews have been a cornerstone of the Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs project, launched in December 2004.