Why hospital ratings should be looked at with a grain of salt (U.S.)

medical news

 Critics have noted that both teaching hospitals and safety net hospitals — both of which tend to deal more with sick, low-income patients — fared poorly in CMS ratings.
 

What’s not in the ratings matters, too

Ratings systems capture huge amounts of information on everything from whether doctors are washing their hands to mortality rates for heart attack patients. But plenty of information is not collected that might help provide a more nuanced — and accurate — assessment of performance. One hospital quality specialist noted, for example, that the severity of a cancer patient’s disease is not typically recorded by hospitals in diagnostic information and doesn’t get factored into outcome data and ratings. This can unfairly penalize hospitals that treat large numbers of patients with advanced cancers....