A Look Inside the Hospital Rankings

Methodology

How is it possible to rank these hospitals without a score for emergency medicine? I would think that a large percentage of the clients for these hospitals would arise from emergency visitis.

methodology

The specialists polled all have links to the hospitals- local, regional or by training-thus making the rankings preferences not true measures of quality. Each hospital may have a strong point within each specialty, but your local hospital/ physician should guide your care.

Heart Hospitals

I could not find the top 10 heart Hospitals. Please email this list. Thank you.

Methodology

Why only look at Medicare admissions? Why not look at all admissions which would include a broader population and perhaps more complicated disease states.

Also, I take issue with using reputation as a benchmark. Many "reputations" are falsely inflated or are the result of professional or academic alignments.

It would be more interesting/valuable to look at patient responses and reports of care received at these institutions as well as broaden the scope of the hard data collected to include all patient admissions.

customer satisfaction

I wonder how the hospitals score on satisfaction of the people they serve.

Methodology response

The reason why "Medicare only" is simple. That is the only readily available database. Health stats for commercial payers are in the hands of the individual hospitals and the individual commerical payers. Medicaid patients' data is in the hands of each state. Because Medicare is "all states," and is available in "one location," and because the data collected must be in the same format from every single facility, it is the easy one use.

There is also a central (non-governmental) repository for Children's hospitals, but I believe that is voluntary.

I agree that basing 1/3 of the total score on Reputation is of dubious merit. For a metrics-centered organization like RTI, I wonder how they justify that?

What do you call best Hospitals?

If you have to wait over 1 hr in a Emercency? A no good Hospital! They take all there Times to get the Patient, drink der Coffee is way more imprtant? Running aroud with Cofefepot in der Hands?? We call this a worse Hospital ever!

Talking about all Hospitals in Florida:-(((((((((((((

To many die there , many People could bve saved but no, Coffee comes first. How Dear!!!!!!!!

marshfield

what about the marshfield clinic in wisconsin? Always has had a great reputation and known as one of the best hospitals in the nation.

BEST HOSPALSIT

I work in healthcare and your information is misleading. You are not looking at all facilities in the country and parts of your criteria will leave out the true Top hospitals. Why not look at:

Press Ganey reports, MEDPAR DATA. CMS quality data.

THAT WILL TELL THE STORY.

From a patient perspective, it is only a "best hospital" if:

there is a zero infection rate

there is a zero mistake rate

RN's with a minimum of BSN degree and understand nursing theory take care of me;

and doctors who value patient input and a pt/provder team approach to treatment;and who understand the meaning or relationship-centered care are providing the medical treatment