Quote:
Originally Posted by villagetinker
I believe there is a problem with the Medicare method of rating hospitals. As I understand it there is an assumption that all hospitals have a similar patient base. Unfortunately for hospitals in this area there is a greater portion of older patients, which leads to a higher-than-average death rate at the hospitals and therefore a lower rating. I do not know of any other rating system, bear this in mind when you start getting replies. The other problem is many of the hospital ERs are being used for NON emergency purposes, which causes major backups, especially during snowbird season. There are now several local stand alone ERs as well as a few Urgent care facilities.
NOTE: it appears if you call an ambulance, you will NOT have a choice of which facility you want to go to, we had this happen personally.
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You are correct. The demographics of a hospital's catchment area greatly affects its rating, and there is even more. Medicare generally bases its ratings on outcomes in 4 DRG's----acute MI (heart attack), CVA (stroke), CAP (Community acquired pneumonia) and nosocomial (hospital acquired) infections. A somewhat poor score in any of those drags the rating down, even if they were 100% in hundreds of other DRGs. And note, the outcome of any of those 4 DRGs gets much worse as the population ages.
On the other hand, specialty hospitals get extremely high ratings---I haven't looked but 10 years ago the #1 rated hospital was solely an ENT facility in Utah, generally followed by single specialty eye hospitals. As you can imagine, there aren't many strokes, heart attacks or pneumonias in those facilities, so their numerator is ZERO.
And lastly, because of the way the data is reported and collated, these ratings lag 2-3 years behind the actual situation at any given facility---no different than looking at a restaurant review from 3 years ago.