Industry Brief:
- New York's hospital trade group, the Healthcare Association of New York State (HANYS), has released a report card ranking the groups that rate hospitals.
- HANYS criteria for ranking the rating groups included whether the groups used measures grounded in scientific evidence, whether they used recent data, and whether hospitals had the chance to review the findings before the ratings groups went public.
- Five of the 10 report cards received low scores, including Consumer Reports' Hospital Safety Ratings, the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Score and Truven Health Analytics Top 100 Hospitals.
Dive Insight:
With consumers, businesses and health plans eager to find the highest quality facilities, ranking hospitals has become a big business, so it's hardly surprising that hospitals are being ranking by multiple outside organizations. But the hospitals of HANYS are right to question any ratings that use old data or fail to base their rating criteria on measures based on scientifically-validated evidence.If stakeholders are going to rely on a hospital ranking, they deserve to know that the rating measures what it ought to measure. Subjective ratings based on opinion should never substitute for scientifically validated criteria. HANYS is right to draw attention to this problem.