A study in Health Affairs found four hospital rating systems — U.S. News & World Report’s Best Hospitals, Healthgrades’ America’s 100 Best Hospitals, Leapfrog’s Hospital Safety Score and Consumer Reports’ Health Safety Score — have very little overlap when it comes to determining which hospitals are “best.”
This is largely because each rating system “uses its own rating methods, has a different focus to its ratings and stresses different measures of performance,” according to the study’s authors. That could leave patients confused as to where they should turn for information and where to seek care — just as the selection committee’s choices leave many coaches, teams and fans feeling perplexed nearly every year.
Since the Illini (my alma mater and the team I follow most closely) didn’t get to dance this year, I chose my bracket based on little real knowledge of the teams in the field and how they look on the court. I used some outside help (namely data journalism site FiveThirtyEight and some good old fashioned gut instinct) but mostly I chose based on seeds.
Like hospital rankings, basketball seeds shape our expectations. We expect to see a higher caliber performance from a three seed than a 14 seed, but that didn’t stop UAB from taking down Iowa State this year. That’s when factors like coincidence, luck, coaching, home-court advantage and an array of other characteristics come into play.
Similarly, we as patients expect higher-ranked hospitals to perform better than their lower-ranked counterparts. But then concerning events, such as major infection outbreaks, come out of well respected, highly ranked institutions like Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Hospital quality rankings, as methodological and data-driven as they may be, cannot account for everything.
That’s not to say that the seeding system is fatally flawed, or that patients shouldn’t look into quality rankings before seeking care — it’s just that perhaps patients, and fans, need to do independent research looking into many sources before making a final choice. If you do take rankings seriously, take them with a grain of salt, as well.
In the healthcare arena, at least, patient research may soon be getting easier. During her speech at the American College of Healthcare Executives Congress on Healthcare Leadership, Christine Cassel, MD, president and CEO of the National Quality Forum, said achieving greater consistency and rigor in consumer information is one of the main tasks facing the industry.
And even though it’s impossible for every hospital to be No. 1 in the nation or even its region — just like it’s impossible for every NCAA basketball team to be a No. 1 seed — the overall national push to improve care quality in hospitals across the nation could mean that soon patients won’t have to worry if the care they’re choosing is high-quality. It will just be a given.
