Most available hospital quality rankings — from Leapfrog, CMS, Healthgrades and others — offer an overall score, meant to represent the quality of care provided overall to all patients at a hospital. However, according to a FairChex whitepaper, those rankings may be misleading to patients who need a specific procedure done.
"The problem is that assigning a single rating to an entire facility can mask significant variation between departments," the whitepaper reads.
FairChex evaluated the specialties of the 20 hospitals on U.S. News & World Report's 2016-17 Honor Roll using risk-adjusted core process measures, patient safety indicators, inpatient quality indicators, mortality rates, complication rates, readmission rates and patient satisfaction measures. The percentile represents that hospital's quality measurement for that category of care as a national percentile.
Of the top 20 U.S. News hospitals, Stanford (Calif.) Hospital and Clinics was the only one without a clinical category in the bottom quartile nationally — its lowest-rated procedure was orthopedic care, in the 41 percentile.