A recent Consumer Reports analysis rating U.S. hospitals on surgical care has found that the biggest and most renowned hospitals aren’t necessarily the best.
Hospitals such as Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles all received middle of the road rankings by the magazine.
The Consumer Reports analysis rated U.S. hospitals based upon how patients fare during or following several different categories of elective surgeries or procedures. Rural and urban hospitals performed better than expected – several urban hospitals did well despite often serving poorer, sicker patients; specialty hospitals tended to rate high – six of the top performers for carotid artery surgery were heart hospitals; and teaching hospitals didn’t always perform much better than other hospitals.
The analysis used billing claims that hospitals submitted to Medicare for patients 65 and older, from 2009 through 2011, and cover 2,463 hospitals in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.
The surgery ratings are based on the percentage of a hospital’s Medicare patients who died in the hospital or stayed longer than expected for their procedure. Research shows that mortality and length of stay correlate with complications, and some hospitals themselves use this approach to monitor quality, said John Santa, MD, medical director of Consumer Reports Health.
The ratings, Santa explained, include an overall surgery rating, which combines results for 27 categories of scheduled surgeries and individual ratings for five specific procedure types: back surgery, hip replacement, knee replacement, angioplasty and carotid artery surgery.
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While 30 percent of hospital patients suffer infections or other complications following these types of surgeries, consumers have very little access to information to help select a hospital in which to have surgery at based upon their complications ratings, Santa said. Although hospitals are required to report to government agencies and some submit data to national registries to see how they stack up against one another, “the data isn’t always available to the public and not much is being released. It’s time to release that data and let the public know about the risks of surgery,” said Santa.
Santa added that gradually, more information is becoming available to the public. Due to healthcare reform, hospitals are encouraged to move to electronic record keeping, and several professional medical organizations have started publishing some of the quality information they collect on hospitals.
[See also: Consumer Reports launches rating system for U.S. hospitals]
By highlighting performance differences in its study, Santa said Consumer Reports hopes to not only provide consumers with more information, but to motivate more hospitals to improve their performance on quality measures.
“We know the ratings aren’t a perfect measurement but we think they’re an important first step in giving patients the information they need to make an informed choice,” he said.
[See also: Quality reports can be facility's best friend]
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