Medicare Prepares to Go Forward With New Hospital Quality Ratings

Despite objections from Congress and the hospital industry, the Obama administration said it will soon publish star ratings summing up the quality of 3,662 hospitals. Nearly half will be rated as average, and hospitals that serve the poor will not score as well overall as will other hospitals, according to government figures released Thursday. The government says the ratings, which will award between one and five stars to each hospital, will be more useful to consumers than its current mishmash of more than 100 individual metrics, many of which deal with technical matters. The hospital industry, however, fears the ratings will be misleading and oversimplify the many types of care at the institutions. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said it would release the ratings “shortly.” In a preemptive effort to rebut criticisms, it noted its analysis showed “hospitals of all types are capable of performing well on star ratings and also have opportunities for improvement.” The stars are based on 64 individual measures of hospitals that are already public on the government’s Hospital Compare website. Those include mortality rates, the number of readmissions, patient opinions, infection rates and frequency of medical scans like

Medicare said that based on its current data, 102 hospitals would receive the best rating of five stars, 934 would get four stars, 1,770 would receive three stars, 723 would be awarded two-stars and 133 would get the lowest rating of one star. Another 937 hospitals would not be rated because the government did not have enough data to properly evaluate them.

Source/more: Kaiser Health News

David Wingate is an elder law attorney at the Elder Law Office of David Wingate, LLC. The elder law office services clients with powers of attorneys, living wills, Wills, Trusts, Medicaid and asset protection. The Elder Law office has locations in Frederick and Montgomery Counties, Maryland.