Hospital ratings fall short
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New research offers this warning to consumers shopping for top-notch hospitals: Many that are highly rated by government regulators only have marginally lower patient death rates.
University of Pennsylvania researchers evaluated 3,657 hospitals nationwide that are listed on a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services website.
They examined three conditions that often lead to hospitalization -- heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia -- and found that death rates for patients with those diseases were only slightly lower at top-rated hospitals in 2004 than at the lowest-rated ones.
The results suggest that better ways of measuring performance are needed to help consumers make meaningful choices, the researchers said. The study appeared in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Assn.
