What Makes A Hospital The “Best”?

U.S. News & World Report recently published its annual “Best Hospitals” issue, which the magazine claims is the “global authority in hospital rankings.” That may be no exaggeration, given the more than two million Google results that appear with the search term “U.S. News hospital rankings” along with the flurry of self-congratulatory tweets posted and banners hung each year by the hospitals whose names appear at the top of the list. While the top-ranked hospitals were patting themselves on the back, we wondered if the magazine’s ranking system actually measures what matters to patients, or for that matter to anybody who is worried about the cost and quality of US health care. So we took a closer look at how U.S. News measures hospital quality and—just as important—what factors its analysis leaves out. Treating Specialty Care As Beauty Contest According to its detailed methodology report, the U.S. News & World Report’s ranking places much more weight on hospitals’ performance in specialties and on serious or complex medical procedures than on care for chronically ill patients, the population that makes up the bulk of hospitalizations. Of the 448 total points a hospital can get toward its total “Honor Roll” score, 340 points come from specialty scores. Within the specialty scores, only outcomes from “challenging or critical” procedures are included. While this could be helpful for the few patients who can actually shop around for a...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Hospitals Quality higher-value care hospital rankings U.S. News & World Report best hospital ranking Source Type: blogs