Healthgrades Revs its Hospital Scoring System

With a revamped quality ranking system, Healthgrades takes its place among other groups scoring hospital safety and quality of care: Leapfrog Group, Consumer Reports, U.S. News & World Report, Truven, and Hospital Compare

Quality of care at 4,500 U.S. hospitals is being sliced, diced, scrutinized, and ranked yet again with a new and significantly expanded quality ranking system from Healthgrades.

This time the Denver-based company, which has provided quality information about healthcare providers for 14 years, offers state-by-state analysis online for up to 28 types of care, 13 safety measures, and five-year trends for four conditions.

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"We've organized this information with a convenient set of tools to help consumers select and filter hospitals based on their particular requirements: proximity, insurance coverage, clinical ratings, patient satisfaction, and safety in a relatively easy to use interface," says Evan Marks, Healthgrades editor. "Getting this information from other sites may be more difficult."

The report, American Hospital Quality Outcomes 2013: Healthgrades Report to the Nation, uses data purchased from MedPAR, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Medicare Provider Analysis and Review  between 2009 and 2011.  The data represents a three-year rolling average.

After applying its algorithms to the data, Healthgrades gives hospitals one, three, or five gold stars on up to 28 types of care—from appendectomy to pulmonary embolism to valve repair—to indicate whether patient outcomes of were worse than expected, as expected, or better than expected.