U.S. News & World Report released its brand-new hospital ratings, called Best Hospitals for Common Care, Wednesday. The following are six things to know about the new ratings.
1. These ratings are different than U.S. News' Best Hospital rankings for a few reasons. First, the Best Hospital ratings are intended to help patients who have life-threatening or rare conditions find hospitals that excel at treating those issues, while Common Care ratings cover performance on five common medical conditions: heart bypass, hip replacement, knee replacement, congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Further, the Best Hospitals program produces a ranked list, while Common Care simply provides ratings of high performing, average or below average.
2. To generate the ratings, U.S. News evaluated more than 25 quality measures, like mortality, readmissions, infections and patient satisfaction scores, as well as more than 5 million patient records, accounting for patients' health conditions, age, sex, socioeconomic status and other factors. Hospitals were not rated in a procedure if they treated too few patients. Data was pulled from CMS for Medicare patients, as well as from the American Hospital Association annual survey and from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons clinical registry.
3. More than 4,500 hospitals were evaluated in at least one of the five procedures. Approximately 90 percent of the hospitals rated in each of the conditions or procedures were high performing or average. "The good news for patients is that the majority of hospitals performed average or better," said Ben Harder, chief of health analysis for U.S. News.
4. Further, 34 hospitals earned a high performing rating in all five procedures or conditions. An additional six hospitals that did not offer heart bypass surgery were rated as high performing in the remaining four categories.
5. However, more than 700 hospitals were rated below average in one or more procedure or condition. For the surgical procedures, a below average rating was associated with a mortality rate approximately twice the national average.
6. While this year's ratings were limited to five procedures, U.S. News plans to expand into other common procedures or conditions in later years.