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Milwaukee's Rankings: a Missing Zip Code
Tweet Share on Facebook July 19, 2012 CommentOur Best Hospitals and Best Regional Hospitals rankings apply a methodology to a mix of complicated clinical data, such as survival of certain patients with specific conditions and the numbers of staff nurses per shift separately assigned to inpatients and outpatients, and identifying information, such as hospital addresses.
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Further Correction, Best Children's Hospitals 2012-13
Tweet Share on Facebook July 17, 2012 CommentIn this column on June 14, we called attention to programming errors that required corrections to the Best Children's Hospitals 2012-13 rankings. We subsequently learned from our contractor about an additional error that affected the rankings of hospitals in Nephrology. Correcting the error changed 31 hospitals' Nephrology rankings. No hospitals left or entered the rankings as a result of the correction. The Honor Roll was unaffected.
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Behind the Curtains of the Best Hospitals Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook July 3, 2012 CommentThe carmine-red cover of the April 30, 1990, issue of U.S. News & World Report marked the debut of “America’s Best Hospitals.” The concept was a breakthrough—hospitals had never been publicly rated before—but the first effort was decidedly modest, listing eight to 16 hospitals in a dozen specialties based on a survey of 400 physicians. At that time, apples-to-apples clinical data showing how well hospitals delivered care didn’t exist, so out of necessity the U.S. News evaluation relied solely on hospitals’ reputations.
Much has changed. While reputation continues to play an important role in the Best Hospitals rankings, clinical data such as patient outcomes and processes of care have become central. We moved away from relying on reputation alone in 1993, adding mortality, nurse staffing, and other hard measures with a direct link to the quality of patient care. Clinical yardsticks now make up nearly 70 percent of a hospital’s score in most specialties. The evolution of the methodology toward broader and deeper use of objective measures has been possible because the federal government and the healthcare community have slowly but steadily opened important data vaults to public scrutiny. -
Introducing State Rankings to Best Hospitals
Tweet Share on Facebook July 3, 2012 CommentWe published an advance look in March at the upcoming expansion of the Best Hospitals regional offerings, which will incorporate statewide rankings of hospitals. Now, with Best Hospitals 2012-13 slated for release July 17, we can provide more details.
Last year we introduced rankings in major metropolitan areas. Hospitals nationally ranked in one or more specialties were also ranked in their respective metro areas, for the first time giving consumers a way to compare these hospitals to neighboring institutions. Also ranked in the metro areas are "high-performing" hospitals—those that aren't nationally ranked but perform nearly as well as their nationally ranked brethren in at least one specialty. Including high-performing hospitals in our metro rankings highlighted significantly more options for tens of millions of patients who live in or near a major city and who don't necessarily need a nationally ranked hospital to address their medical needs.
