Hospital rankings have dominated the news the last week, from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ star ratings to U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of the nation’s best hospitals. But consumers shouldn't take any of the assessments as gospel, argues STAT.
For starters, ratings are subjective by nature, according to the piece; the measures derive from objective data such as medical error rates, but at some point during the process, someone has to take the subjective step of deciding how to weigh the data. For example, Rochester, Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic was the only one of U.S. News’ top five hospitals to earn a five-star score from CMS.
Moreover, some hospitals have more resources at their disposal to improve their scores than others, according to J.B. Silvers, a professor of healthcare finance at Case Western Reserve University. “Some hospitals are better at working the numbers than others,” Silvers told STAT. “My guess is the safety-net hospitals aren’t as good at it as richer hospitals.”
Moreover, critics of the CMS system in particular have argued that hospitals’ ratings hinge largely on factors that may be outside their control, with hospitals serving the poor and chronically ill far less likely to receive high scores.
And the ratings often fail to factor in potentially vital data, according to the article; for example, severity of individual patients’ cancer is generally not recorded by hospitals and consequently not reflected in official data. As a result, data on cancer mortality rates tells consumers nothing about the number of advanced cancer cases.
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