New national hospital rating system reveals a select group of excellent hospitals

Only 10% of hospitals were rated as being high-performing

A new “Common Care” rating system has been developed to let patients know how their hospitals rank for common procedures.

The Common Care hospital rating system

The recently created system has produced data that revealed the performance of 4,600 different U.S. hospitals. The hospitals were judged on their ability to treat patients that needed knee and hip replacements, as well as those who needed to be treated for chronic health conditions such as congestive heart failure.

The hospitals’ performances were determined by evaluating over 25 unique quality measures, including infections, mortality, and patient satisfaction, with more than 5 million patient records analyzed.

The analysis revealed that:

• around 10% of hospitals were rated high-performing in each procedure or condition, which is above the national average;
• another 10% of hospitals came in below the statistical national average; and
• only thirty-four total hospitals had high-performing ratings in each of the five procedures and conditions.

Future plans

While only a total of five different treatments were considered in this first analysis, it is said that the next one will include more. It was stated that data for over a dozen other elective surgical procedures may be published as early as 2016.

Ben Harder, chief of health analysis for U.S. News, stated that he acknowledges the limitations of the science used to measure the quality of healthcare, which is a field that is widely regarded as being greatly underdeveloped. The U.S. news plans to address these limitations by improving upon their methods with access to outpatient claims data as well as working with numerous registries. While it seems as though many of the hospitals that were involved in this analysis scored well, there is still quite a bit of work to be done with regards to refining the science of measuring healthcare for the most accurate results possible.

Find the best hospital for you

You can access the system here.

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