Medicare officials are taking steps to show how local hospitals compare on certain measures of patient satisfaction and clinical care.

And they want you to know about it.

Today, the federal agency is running ads in newspapers in all 50 states, including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, to alert health care consumers about the information. It is available at the Hospital Compare Web site, www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/Hospital, or by calling 1-800-MEDICARE.

"Compare the Quality of Your Local Hospitals," reads the Post-Gazette ad, which lists specific information for a number of area hospitals on a clinical benchmark -- how often patients received antibiotics before surgery.

The ad also shows how often former patients surveyed felt they always received help when they wanted it during their hospital stays.

Still other information is available at the Web site.

Consumers can find out, for example, that about 70 percent of recent former patients at Allegheny General Hospital and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Presbyterian and Shadyside hospitals felt their nurses always communicated well.

At all three hospitals, fewer than half of patients surveyed felt the area around their hospital rooms was quiet at night.

Around 60 percent of respondents said they would give those hospitals a rating of 9 or 10, with 10 being the highest score. And about two-thirds said they would definitely recommend the hospitals to others.

Officials have said that the disclosure of patient satisfaction data gives both consumers and hospitals information they have not had before.

In general, area hospitals tended to fare worse on the survey responses, which assess patients' reaction to their hospital stays, than on the clinical measures, such as antibiotic treatment before surgery.

The survey responses may be more helpful to consumers, in part because it is difficult for many of them to assess the relative importance of some of the clinical measures, said Paul Precht, a spokesman for the Medicare Rights Center, an advocacy group.

The lower percentages for the survey responses suggest "a lot of our processes are not as patient-centered as they should be," said Tami Merryman, vice president of UPMC's Center for Quality Improvement and Innovation. "I look at it as an opportunity for us to continue to improve."

UPMC has mounted a number of efforts to improve care based on input from patients and their family members. For example, both UPMC Shadyside and Children's Hospital created groundbreaking programs to help patients or their family members summon a medical response team when they believe problems have gone unnoticed.

West Penn Allegheny Health System officials also see some use for the survey results, said Tom Chakurda, vice president, communications for WPAHS.

"We clearly support this growing trend for transparency. We'll use this data to improve our patients' satisfaction and quality of care." He added that it will be used along with the hospitals' quality monitoring systems already at work.

For example, he said WPAHS has been successful in a recent initiative in the Allegheny General Hospital emergency department that focused on better patient flow and satisfaction. In the last quarter, the department saw a 5 percent gain in its score from a Press Ganey patient satisfaction survey.

He said WPAHS has other processes to improve patient care, and the same emergency department initiative is being used now at West Penn Hospital.

The Medicare survey data is the most recent to be added to the Hospital Compare Web site. The effort to provide the data involves the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and other members of the Hospital Quality Alliance, a collaborative of groups representing consumers, hospitals, doctors, employers, accrediting organizations and federal agencies.