As soon as you enter the lobby of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, you simply can’t miss all the signs reminding you that Hopkins is ranked No. one hospital in the US by U.S. News & World Report. Hopkins is justifiably happy of accomplishing that top rated place year after year, but does it mean anything at all for patient safety and quality of health care?
A recent report in Annals of Internal Medicine finds that for the 50 top-ranked hospitals, there is very little correlation between their U.S. News rank and any objective measurements of quality of care. But when the authors ran the data, they determined the hospital’s subjective reputation among medical doctors made up 90 to 100 percent of the hospital’s overall U.S. News ranking. Basically, the word of mouth recognition of the hospital among doctors — not among patients — counts for a large amount of the news magazine’s popular ratings system.
Selecting the right hospital is not simple. But there are some basic guidelines. Focus on the brand-name hospitals like Hopkins only if you have an exotic condition that very few medical professionals have ever viewed.
In its 20 years of rating hospitals, U.S. News has never questioned a single patient what they think; its ratings of a hospital’s recognition in a specific specialty is based exclusively on what medical doctors in that specialty think. But now Medicare has started requiring hospitals to have patients fill out a standardized survey when they leave the hospital, and the questions concentrate on a lot of concerns that people care about and have a massive influence on the quality and safety of their care, such as:
Did the doctors and nurses always communicate well? Was the bathroom always clean? Was your pain always well-controlled? Was the area around your room always quiet at night?
Note that little word “always.” These are things patients have a right to expect – always.
You are going to find that many community hospitals do a greater job than the mega-hospitals of taking care of patients in the ways that patients notice.
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