Patients who were treated in Concord Hospital reported being much happier with their care than patients at many other New Hampshire hospitals, but that didn’t stop the facility from getting a middle-of-the-road three stars out of five in the latest Medicare ranking of thousands of hospitals.
Franklin Regional Hospital also received three stars, as did the majority of hospitals around the country and about half of the 19 New Hampshire hospitals that received rankings. New London Hospital was the only New Hampshire facility to get a lower score, at 2 stars.
The 2015 Hospital Compare ranking from Medicare.gov, the site for the federal health-insurance program for the elderly, were released Tuesday as part of efforts to provide information for consumers of health care, to help control costs and improve care.
The five-star ranking system is based on data from around 60 different measurements from patient surveys, medical forms and other data provided by hospitals via the Hospital Inpatient and Outpatient Quality Reporting Programs, run by the Centers for Medicare Services, or CMS.
As with most programs that distill many pieces of information into a single score, the measurement has drawn criticism for being misleading. Critics say, for example, that it penalizes hospitals which accept more than their share of poor or very sick patients, and that some hospitals have begun to “game” the system, sidestepping useful medical care because it counts badly on the scorecard.
Further, there is no objective answer as to which pieces of data about hospital operations are most important, which helps explain why, as the Boston Globe’s Stat medical section noted, only one of the top five hospitals under a similar system from US News and World Reports received the top score of five stars under the CMS rating.
Even within a single facility, it’s not easy to parse out why a certain score was achieved or how to judge it. Concord Hospital, for example, did better than the national average for its death rate for pneumonia patients but worse than average for its death rate for heart failure patients, and was average for death rate of heart attack patients.
One area where Concord Hospital did uniformly well was patients’ experience. On 11 different survey topics, ranging from whether “pain was always well controlled” to “given information about what to do during their recovery at home” to “their nurses always communicated well,” Concord did better than the national average and almost always better than the state average.
Notably, 81 percent of patients said “they would definitely recommend” Concord Hospital, compared to a statewide average of 74 percent and national average of 71 percent.
The Hospital Compare database can be searched online at www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek)
No New Hampshire hospital received five stars on the rating system from the Centers for Medicare Services, nor did any received one star. The scores:
Four stars:
Catholic Medical Center, Manchester; Frisbie Memorial Hospital, Rochester; Wentworth-Douglas Hospital, Dover; Monadnock Community Hospital, Peterborough; Southern N.H. Medical Center, Nashua; St. Jospeh Hospital, Nashua; Exeter Hospital, Exeter ; Valley Regional Hospital, Claremont
Three stars:
Concord Hospital; Elliot Hospital, Manchester; Franklin Hospital, Franklin; Lakes Region Hospital, Laconia; Parkland Medical Center, Derry; Huggins Memorial Hospital, Wolfeboro; Portsmouth Regional, Portsmouth; Speare Memorial Hospital, Plymouth; Alice Peck Day, Lebanon; Mary Hitchcock Memorial, Lebanon.
Two stars:
New London Hospital, New London.
