Jordan Rau's stories have been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and on npr.org and nbcnews.com, among other media outlets. He came to Kaiser Health News in 2009.
Hospital ratings often come to wildly different conclusions. Some hospitals rated as outstanding by one group are ignored or panned by another. Ratings results from an individual group can change significantly from year to year. Instead of offering clarity, hospital ratings often yield confusion.
Medicare on Dec. 20 disclosed bonuses and penalties for nearly 3,000 hospitals as it ties almost $1 billion in payments to the quality of care provided to patients.
Medicare has begun publishing patient safety ratings for thousands of hospitals, but the latest data is intensifying objections from the hospital industry and some academic researchers that Medicare is using dubious and unfair measurements in ways that will hurt some hospitals.
The Veterans Health Administration, the largest integrated healthcare system in the country, has long employed many of the approaches Medicare is pushing on all hospitals to cut unnecessary readmissions. But new data show VA hospital patients are just as likely to end up back in the hospital as are patients at private hospitals.