Hospitals Are Rated Top to Bottom

There is more and more information being looked at regarding hospitals and their performance. Now it is being released to the public on various websites that show which hospitals do the best work and keep patients safest and which are not.

For example, one particular website, HealthGrades.com, includes valuable information about mortallity rates and complication rates about every U..S. hospital.

If your mom has a stroke, wouldn't you want to take her to the absolute best hospital available that would give her the highest chance of complete recovery? Of course you would. Why not look at some of the web sites that examine the hospitals and let those hospitals - and us - know how well they are doing taking care of their patients.

Written in everyday language, there’s also a wide array of information at your fingertips about stroke, heart attacks, hip replacement and just about every medical issue that your family could face.

In a recent study, HealthGrades carefully analyzed nearly 41 million Medicare hospitalization records from 2005 to 2007.

The study found that only 5 percent of U.S. hospitals meet quality clinical standards to receive a HealthGrades’ designation as a Distinguished Hospital for Clinical Excellence.

An estimated 152,666 lives could have been saved and 11,772 complications could have been avoided had all Medicare patients been treated at a Distinguished Hospital for Clinical Excellence, the study found. In addition, these elite hospitals have mortality rates that are on average 27 percent lower, and complication rates that are on average 8 percent lower, than the U.S. average.

If you had the choice to take your mother to a hospital where mortality rates are 27 percent lower than average, wouldn’t you take her there?

HealthGrades also provides “star ratings,” which are quality ratings of 26 procedures and treatments for virtually every hospital in the country. Each hospital receives a star rating based on its patient outcomes for mortality or complication rates for each procedure or treatment.

Do your homework. Make sure where the best hospitals are in advance.

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Medicare Releases More Hospital Performance Results

Medicare has been working to start making sure that hospitals deliver better results for their patients.  They have been studying the numbers of readmissions, deaths and other outcomes in over 4,000 hospitals throughout the country.  The studies are a precursor to rewarding hospitals for good performance by possibly offering bonuses versus paying hospitals at a lower rate if they need to improve their performance and outcomes.

The Medicare information released focuses on the number and percentage of patient deaths during or after a hospital stay or readmission.  This monitoring is good news for patients because it has “encouraged” hospitals to improve services. 

Some of the improvement measures that hospitals have reported using for better outcomes have been better monitoring, more careful use of catheters and other instruments that can create and spread infections, such as staph infections which can be fatal, better information to patients when they are about to be released, and better follow-up including phone calls to patients once they have gone home. 

The hospitals that saw improvement in outcomes reported using many of these measures.  The hospitals that did not fare quite as well agree that there is room for improvement, but they – and others – cite some inaccurate figures and results.  For instance, in one hospital that had a high number of deaths from pneumonia, 60% of the patients in that group were over 80 years old, very frail and had other medical issues and complications.

In another group of patients at one particular hospital two-thirds of them actually died in nursing homes, and most of them contracted the pneumonia after they left the hospital.  Another hospital reports that over 90% of the group of patients that died of pneumonia had a “Do Not Resuscitate” order which does not give an accurate picture of the hospital’s role in their death.

The results of this study are important to be aware of, and the fact that the study was done indicates that Medicare is looking at ways to help patients be safe and receive the best quality care possible.  Even while the kinks are being worked out, care is improving for patients.

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