People’s questions about hospitals’ efficiency are now answered, as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says it can provide those answers and many others through its Web site, www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.

In fact, the Web site is the subject of the first national advertising campaign worth nearly $1.9 million, which focuses on the quality of hospital care in the U.S. There will be newspaper ads running in 58 newspapers in 49 states that disclose hospital satisfaction rates, as a way to reflect an emphasis by the Bush administration to increase transparency in the health care system.

The ads will reflect how well patients said they got the help needed and how consistently the hospital gives surgical patients antibiotics. The latter information reflects broad interest in curbing infections acquired at the hospital. The ads will include more than 2,500 hospitals, according to the Associated Press.

The ads are intended to make anyone reading them to surf over the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Web site, simply called Hospital Compare, Kerry Weems, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Patients and their family members can use this information to see how well their hospitals are providing care, and hospitals can use the data to focus on areas where there is opportunity to improve the quality of care,” Weems said as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

The Web site provides information about hospital outcomes, care quality and procedure costs for Medicare patients that can be used to compare hospitals and state and national benchmarks.

The Web site has information on roughly 4,000 hospitals nationwide, which is updated quarterly. More than 2,500 hospitals voluntarily collected information from a random sample of discharged patients treated between October 2006 and June 2007. The patients were questioned 48 hours to six weeks after discharge from a hospital.