Dive Brief:
- Patients now have access to two new sources of hospital ratings: a new website developed by AnalyticsMD that provides rankings based on CMS data, and a new US News evaluation that rates hospital performance on five common medical procedures and treatments.
- AnalyticsMD's rankings are based on emergency department performance, patient satisfaction and in-patient cost efficiency and rank hospitals against one another.
- The new US News evaluation looks at heart bypass, hip and knee replacement surgeries, and treatment of congestive heart failure and COPD.
Dive Insight:
Tough to evaluate yet how much impact these data sources will have—the industry is still struggling to reach a consensus on how best to measure quality of care. Right now, the four top recognized hospital ratings systems used by consumers contradict each other, use vastly different judging criteria and actually provide more confusion than clarity, according to a new study published by Health Affairs.
While the usefulness of CMS' quality metrics is still the subject of industry debate, AnalyticsMD does present a sophisticated front-end experience: The hospital search tool is easy to navigate and the data is presented in a user-friendly, well-designed format with interactive data visualization tools. It's easy to understand why TIME is calling this site "Yelp for hospitals."
The US News' "Best Hospitals for Common Care" ratings measures Medicare data from about 4,000 hospitals. Although most hospitals performed average or better, according to Ben Harder, chief of health analysis for the publication, the ratings did not include more than 1,700 hospitals that perform too few procedures of the common procedures.
Want to read more? You may enjoy this story on what hospital rating systems really measure.