CMS forges ahead with hospital ratings

Earlier this year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) encountered some criticism when they prepared to release their overall hospital ratings, with even senators chiming in. CMS has already released ratings information on specific criteria, but those are often too granular for the average consumer. These overall hospital ratings are meant to simplify the consumer experience. After a few months of deliberation, CMS recently announced that they plan on going ahead with their release of overall hospital ratings.

As expected, some from the medical community continue to object. Kaiser Health News reported that an executive at the Association of American Medical Colleges protested that the ratings must be flawed given that many prestigious have low ratings. Reputations are certainly a reasonable sanity check to think about, but given how subjective they are, it's unclear whether the differences clearly point to a problem with the rating system or whether some reputations have so far been unwarranted. A more constructive approach would be for the medical community to criticize specific metrics or specific weightings -- doing so, however, would almost force them to suggest alternatives, which they seem reluctant to do. To be clear, no one thinks that these ratings are perfect (probably even people at CMS); what's being debated here is whether these ratings are a reasonable next step.

From a consumer perspective, the individual ratings have been criticized before for their lack of variation among different hospitals; that is, the vast majority of hospitals got an average rating, rendering the ratings mostly useless. It appears that only about one half of the hospitals will receive three out of five stars, suggesting that these ratings are likely to be more helpful to consumers.