US News and World Report's "Best Hospitals" rankings based on nothing

[Neonanocyborgasm]

To put it more precisely, the well known "best hospitals" rankings of US News & World Report turns out to be due to nothing more than reputation, and not on objective measures. This was the conclusion from a study published in the journal "Annals of Internal Medicine" and reprinted in "HeartWire", and internet service that sends digests of updates in the field of cardiovascular health. Unfortunately, I cannot link any of this to you because it requires subscription, so I will show a brief quote.

Popular Best-Hospital List Tracks Subjective Reputation, But Not Quality Measures
Reed Miller

April 20, 2010 (Cleveland, Ohio) — US News & World Report's list of the top 50 hospitals in the US reflects the subjective reputations of the institutions and not objective measures of hospital quality, according to a new analysis [1].

The magazine's ranking methodology includes results of a survey of 250 board-certified physicians from across the country, plus various objective data such as availability of specific medical technology, whether the hospital is a teaching institution or not, nurse-to-patient ratios, risk-adjusted mortality index based on Medicare claims, and whether the American Nurses Credentialing Center has designated the center as a nurse magnet.

In his analysis of the US News rankings system, published April 19, 2010 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, Dr Ashwini Sehgal (Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH) points out that previous investigations have compared the US News rankings with external measures and found that highly ranked cardiology hospitals had lower adjusted 30-day mortality among elderly patients with acute MI, but that many of the high-ranked centers scored poorly in providing evidence-based care for patients with MI and heart failure. Also, performance on Medicare's core measures of MI, congestive heart failure, and community-acquired pneumonia were frequently at odds with US News rankings.

So it turned out that nearly all the hospitals who had high ratings were only subjectively believed to be good based on reputation, and were actually poor performers of medical care based on objective measures. Meanwhile, the opposite was true of those hospitals who had lower reputations. This just goes to show you that you have to be very skeptical of all these claims, as they tend to be self-serving. I wouldn't be surprised if USN&WP was also getting kickbacks for publishing these tracts.

 

[MoGo]

Im just playing devils advocate, but is it possible that the people who are sickest and most likely to die are sent to the so-called best hospitals, which drags their numbers down?

 

[ori]

unlikely with heart attack patients - they don't get carted cross country in the acute infarctation...

 

[innonimatu]

Only fools believe in any of those published rankings anyway. The whole purpose of those things is propaganda, it's a certainty that the statistics (when there are any to start with!) will have been manipulated.

 

[Brighteye]

The same happens in the UK. Published hospital rankings are a load of rubbish due to government and management fiddling.