Patient advocate: Hospital rankings incomplete

Dayton ranks No. 3 in nation for quality of area hospital care

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By Ben Sutherly, Staff Writer Updated 12:46 AM Wednesday, January 26, 2011

DAYTON — Health care consumers should not use HealthGrades ratings alone in deciding where to seek hospital care, a patient advocate said Tuesday.

“It’s a very narrow set of measures that leaves out other important measures,” such as nurse-to-patient ratio and avoidable readmissions, said Cathy Levine, executive director of Universal Health Care Action Network in Columbus.

Dr. Rick May, coauthor of a HealthGrades study out today, agreed patients should base health care decisions on multiple sources of information, but added HealthGrades “looks purely at objective outcomes.”

Medicare mortality and complication rates at hospitals are good proxies, May said. “Low mortality rates don’t happen in isolation.”

HealthGrades, a for-profit company, ranked cities on the quality of their hospitals’ care in a first-of-its-kind report released today. It ranked Dayton third in the United States, and Ohio sixth among the states.

HealthGrades, which reviews hospitals independently but charges hospitals that promote its ratings, found the top 5 percent of hospitals had risk-adjusted mortality rates 30 percent lower than other hospitals for 2007-2009.

Ohio Hospital Compare, managed by the state Department of Health, provides a broader range of measures from an objective source, Levine said. Those data are available at ohiohospitalcompare.ohio.gov

It’s unfortunate consumers have to research hospitals before deciding where they’ll receive care, Levine said. The government should have a greater role in overseeing hospital safety, just as it oversees airline safety, she said.

“The burden shouldn’t be on consumers to figure out which hospitals are safe,” Levine said.

HealthGrades’ hospital rankings

1. West Palm Beach, Fla.

2. Brownsville, Texas

3. Dayton

4. Minneapolis-St. Paul

5. Tucson (Sierra Vista), Ariz.

Other Ohio cities  in the top 50:

6. Cincinnati

13. Cleveland

39. Youngstown

43. Columbus