Hospitals Rated for Quality
HealthGrades, a Colorado group which leads in the field of health-care quality measurement, has just published new rankings for hospitals across the country. Much like the rating of hotels, under the HealthGrades system, medical centers get one, three or five stars based on how many patients develop complications and die after receiving treatment.
Rankings are provided for a variety of procedures, including back and neck surgery, coronary bypass surgery, prostate surgery, angioplasty, and respiratory failure. One star indicates poor performance, three stars represent "as expected," and five stars go to the very best performers. The rankings are based on three years of data from Medicare and are adjusted to reflect the condition of the patient.
HealthGrade analyzed tens of millions of Medicare claims to develop the ratings.
The HealthGrade rankings by state and by condition are provided to the public on the firm’s website, www.healthgrades.com. Overall, HealthGrades says patients have a 70 percent lower chance of dying in a five-star hospital compared with a hospital with a one-star ranking.
For consumers, the data clearly demonstrates that real differences exist between different facilities – and a patient is benefited by researching the ranking of a facility before admission. If a procedure is recommended by a treating physician to occur at a facility with low rankings, at a minimum you should ask your doctor why that particular center was chosen.