Two years ago, Dario Centorselli, who works for Elmhurst Hospital, quickly became one of its patients when his heart began to beat rapidly. “The first thing they gave me was aspirin,” the communications director said.

The first thing they give all their heart-attack patients at the city-run hospital at Queens, according to a new online federal database, is aspirin, which saves lives by improving circulation.

Similar treatment is not so predictable at other hospitals, however. At Mount Sinai Medical Center at Manhattan’s Upper East Side, for example, aspirin is said to have been administered to heart-attack victims 86% of the time between January and June last year – one of the lowest rates in the city.

Such comparisons are now available for the first time for patients looking to see how the nearly 4,200 hospitals across the country measure up against one another. Published at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov last Friday by the Department of Health and Human Services, the database allows users to contrast how often hospitals follow commonly accepted protocols, such as the administration of aspirin to patients like Mr. Centorselli, for certain medical conditions.

The database focused on three ailments: heart attacks, heart failure, and pneumonia. Specifically, it purports to record hospitals’ compliance with 17 commonly accepted protocols for treating those ailments.

Those who helped hospitals collect the data, which are eventually validated by an independent contractor, said the federal government plans to widen the scope of the information collected to include other measurements of hospitals’ quality of care. Studies this fall will include patients’ experiences of hospitals and how hospitals prevent infection, the chief medical officer at Ipro, Clare Bradley, said. Ipro is a company that works with the state and the hospitals to collect data.

When it came to other protocols considered to be the measure of good medicine, some New York hospitals excelled, the database suggests.

For example, doctors at Lenox Hill Hospital at the Upper East Side consistently gave heart-attack patients beta blockers – drugs that help reduce blood pressure and keep blood vessels from constricting the heart, brain, and body.

In the newly released statistics, the often-maligned city-run hospitals tend to do well. That was certainly true for the percentage of heart-attack patients who received aspirin upon arriving at or being discharged from the hospital, according to the database. At one of the public hospitals at Manhattan, Bellevue, doctors were said to have given aspirin to every heart-attack patient during the time the study was conducted last year. The drug is widely used because it thins the blood and makes it easier for a damaged heart to circulate oxygen throughout the body.

“It’s usually thought public hospitals don’t give good care,” the senior vice president and chief medical officer for the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation, Van Dunn, said. “But we’re doing well.” Dr. Dunn quickly added: “We could always do better.”

One area of improvement will surely include the percentage of heart-attack patients who were given instructions for how to control their heart disease upon discharge. According to the database, the citywide average is 40% of patients, compared to the national average of 45%.

“All of us want to improve the quality of care for our patients,” the chief quality officer at New York Presbyterian hospital, Mary Cooper, said. “We are going in the direction many of us need to move toward: transparency and measurability.”

The statistics showed New York Presbyterian gave 97% of their heart-attack patients aspirin upon arriving.

Dr. Cooper said different results did not necessarily mean substandard care, if the margin is less than 10 percentage points, since the database merely provides a snapshot of a small handful of ailments and the protocol for treating them, not hospitals’ success rates. Nevertheless, the database has already served to improve patient care at New York Presbyterian, she said.

“What is on the table for all of us is to be the best – when we look at ourselves compared to other hospitals, we all want to be the best,” Dr. Cooper said.

Though meant to give patients a side-by-side view of hospitals, those familiar with the database said another goal is to improve transparency and to galvanize hospitals to compete with one another to offer better care.

That has been the case at Mount Sinai Hospital, whose director of public affairs, Mel Granick, said the 86% recorded as the rate at which the hospital administered aspirin to heart-attack patients did not accurately reflect the hospital’s efforts. That percentage and the one for beta-blockers, measured at a low 73% from data provided last year, have improved vastly and now hover near 100%, he said.

“This provides a focal point for improvement,” Mr. Granick said.

Other measures on the database include percentage of patients given smoking-cessation counseling.

For patients suffering from pneumonia, the measurements included the percentage given oxygenation assessments, since the illness can lower oxygen in the blood. For that category, hospitals in the New York area equaled the national average of 98%. Hospitals here exceeded by seven percentage points the national average of 43% for giving patients the vaccine that helps prevent pneumonia.

For several years, information from hospitals was reported voluntarily. In 2003, the Medicare Modernizations Act added some incentive by linking payments for Medicare and Medicaid patients with the disclosure of quality of care data. More than 98% of the hospitals in the country began reporting data to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which organized the database.

Still, a spokesman for that agency said the data are so narrowly focused that patients should not use the database as the only tool to judge hospitals’ performance.

“Patients should use this to spark conversation and changes within the hospitals themselves,” Peter Ashkenaz said.

An industry expert, too, said that, for now at least, the results of the database are limited.

“Here are indicators about a few conditions. Ultimately, dozens of conditions with numerous indicators will be brought on,” the president of the industry policy group the United Hospital Fund, James Tallon, said. “This is like the early days of Consumer Reports. The sophistication of the comparison is going to get a lot deeper and a lot better.”