Hospital Ratings Revealed in New Report

Hospital Ratings

HealthGrades.com, a website that provides physicians and hospital ratings in the United States, recently released its report titled 2011 Healthcare Consumerism and Hospital Quality in America, based on its analysis of patient outcomes at nearly 5000 hospitals.

Kerry Hicks, CEO at HealthGrades, explains why the physician and hospital ratings are offered to the public, in saying, “Patients are increasingly demanding objective clinical quality measures on which to base their healthcare decisions. HealthGrades is proud to be a leader in making quality performance information not only transparent to the public, but readily accessible and actionable. HealthGrades continues to innovate with the goal of empowering patients to create their best possible healthcare experience.”

Among the important findings of this report, a notable one was that there still exists a large gap between the quality of healthcare between hospitals that received a rating of 1-star and 5-star, leading to higher rates of complications and mortality. If a patient was admitted to a 5-star hospital, he or she stood a 73 % lower risk of dying as opposed to patients from 1-star hospitals. In fact, almost 240,040 lives would have been saved if all of these hospitals operated at the same levels of quality.

Another significant finding of the report was that more and more patients are using HealthGrades to find doctors and hospitals that offer the best quality, amounting to almost 10 million people during January and June 2011, apart from using the web to find treatment-specific information.

Some of the top cities where HealthGrade’s information registered high search volumes were New York, Washington D.C., Seattle, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Boston, Gainsville, Dallas, Baltimore and Atlanta.