Four hospital rating systems aimed at consumers vary in their conclusions on how facilities are performing because each uses its own methodology. The findings were published in Health Affairs.
The authors examined ratings released in 2012 and 2013 from U.S. News & World Report, HealthGrades, the LeapFrog group and Consumer Reports. The latter two are non-profit organizations, while the other two are for-profit. The hospitals did not pay to get rated.
Consumer Reports does not allow hospitals to use the ratings in promotional materials, while the other three organizations allow hospitals to pay a fee and then use the ratings in their advertisements.
In all, 83 hospitals were rated by all four systems, but no hospital received high performer status in all four ratings system. Further, 10 percent of the 844 hospitals receiving a high performer grade in one system were rated as a high performer in any other system.
Each of the ratings systems has different eligibility criteria and measurements.
The authors noted a few limitations, including that they used only one round of ratings for each of the systems, evaluated only four rating systems, had to define high-performing and low-performing in rating systems that had no formal definitions and none of the rating systems defined what constituted a hospital.
“The complexity and opacity of the ratings is likely to cause confusion instead of driving patients and purchasers to higher-quality, safer care,” the authors wrote. “Given our findings, maximum transparency regarding each rating’s measures and methods is needed to help stakeholders understand any individual rating and to compare across ratings. There is also a need to better understand whether the disagreement in rankings serves as a motivation for hospitals to provide more complete information to consumers.”
Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.