Death rates at hospitals that rank at the top of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Hospital Compare web site aren’t significantly different than those at hospitals rated at the bottom, according to a new study published in JAMA. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania examined hospitals’ performance in 2004 on Medicare quality-of-care measures for treating heart attacks, heart failure, and pneumonia. They found that the highest-ranked hospitals had death rates associated with heart attacks and pneumonia that were only 0.5% lower than hospitals that performed the worst on the quality measures, reports the Associated Press. And although it may appear that 9,000 lives per year might be saved if patients went only to the highest-ranked hospitals, the real numbers are lower, because not everyone can access hospitals at the top of the Hospital Compare rankings, said the researchers. An accompanying JAMA editorial questioned whether Hospital Compare is a valuable assessment of hospital quality, but CMS told the AP that evaluating hospitals based on all 22 quality measures would have yielded large differences between hospitals.
