How does your hospital measure up?

The following is an update on a new Consumer Reports ranking of US Hospitals provided by the American Health Lawyers Association's Health and Life Sciences Law Daily. 

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Consumer Reports Releases Controversial Ranking Of US Hospitals.

NBC Nightly News reported on a Consumer Reports ranking of 2,400 hospitals nationwide. Among those with “lower ratings” than expected in terms of surgical care were “Johns Hopkins and the Cleveland Clinic,” who are “questioning the methodology” of the report. NBC noted that it has the full rankings on its website.

        Reuters (7/31, Begley) reported the ranking of US hospitals in all 50 states by quality of surgical care is the first of its kind. Specifically, the ranking released by Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, examined the percentage of Medicare patients who died in the hospital during or following their surgery, and the percentage of patients who stayed in the hospital longer than what was expected for their ailment. The rankings are expected to be controversial, as some hospitals that usually top similar rankings, such as the Cleveland Clinic, some Mayo Clinic hospitals in Minnesota and Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, ranked far below smaller hospitals.

        Two hospitals that felt slighted by the rankings is Massachusetts General Hospital and the Hospital for Special Surgeries, according to the ABC News (7/31, Lupkin) website. The hospitals are usually ranked among the top in the nation by US News and World Report, but received “the lowest Consumer Reports Rating possible: a solid black circle.” The metric has been questioned by some doctors who were “wary of whether this was the best way to rate hospitals.” For example, patients who stayed longer than what was “expected for a particular surgery” was considered a negative by researchers, who “determined that he or she was more likely to have experienced complications.” Dr. Richard Besser, chief health medical editor for ABC News, noted that “community hospitals, which did better in this report, often refer their more complicated cases” to other hospitals.

        On its website CBS News (7/31, Castillo), noted that Consumer Union examined 27 categories across five procedure types--back surgery, hip replacement, knee replacement, angioplasty and carotid artery surgery--for “scheduled surgeries and individual ratings.”

        NBC News (8/1, Fox) reports on its website that Doris Peter, manager of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center, responded to criticism saying the organization lacks “ratings for Veterans Affairs hospitals and hospitals that see mostly Medicare Advantage patients, such as many Kaiser hospitals, because they use another reporting system,” and the rankings represent “the best we can do using billing data.”

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To see the rankings of hospitals in your city or region, see the Los Angeles Times (8/1, Gorman) “L.A. Now” blog, the Boston (MA) Globe (7/31, Conaboy) “White Coat Notes” blog, theCincinnati Enquirer (7/31, Tweh), the Cleveland Plain Dealer (7/31, Kleinerman), Crain’s Cleveland Business(7/31, Suttell), the Fort Worth (TX) Star-Telegram (7/31, Fuquay), the Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News (7/31, Wenner), Long Island (NY) Newsday (7/31, Ochs) and the Sarasota (FL) Herald-Tribune (7/31, Koehn).