LEAH BINDER: In full disclosure, I run a national nonprofit that advocates transparency and produces a variety of hospital ratings. We don’t charge the public for this, nor do we see ourselves in competition with other hospital ratings. It’s our mission to expand public reporting about hospital performance, so the more the merrier.

    As a daughter, wife, and mother, I advise people to consider the safety of the hospital first. One in four people admitted to a hospital suffers some form of harm unrelated to the condition that got them admitted in the first place. Anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 people—the size of the population of Miami–die every year from medical errors, accidents, and infections in hospitals. But not all hospitals are the same, and some are much safer than others.

    The Hospital Safety Score (produced by my nonprofit) is the only rating laser-focused on those safety issues, errors, accidents, infections and injuries in hospitals. We assign a letter grade to hospitals–A, B, C, D, or F–as a gauge of each institution’s propensity for medical errors.

    After you look at safety, search out ratings on additional important aspects of hospital performance, from places like Consumer Reports, The Leapfrog Group (my organization), U.S. News, Healthgrades and others. One source I would not recommend is Medicare’s website, Hospital Compare, because (for tiresome political reasons) it rates most hospitals as average.

    The hospital lobby tends to dislike hospital ratings, complaining that there’s too much information available to the public on hospital performance. They also argue that because many raters don’t agree with one another, the whole idea of rating hospitals is futile.

    Like most people, I disagree. In fact, there can never be too much information available when a patient faces a life-or-death decision about hospital care. Ratings vary because hospitals are complex entities, and any one hospital might have a range of strengths and weaknesses. For instance, one hospital might have top-notch orthopedic surgery but poor maternity care; ratings that focus on orthopedics will give them a high score, while ratings centered on maternity care won’t.

    By far the biggest problem with publicly available information about hospital performance is that there’s not enough of it. The overall lack of transparency in health care is nothing short of a national disgrace, and it means ratings can only skim the surface of what consumers deserve to know. There’s great resistance in the health care industry to making more data public, and that’s why business and consumer advocacy is so important.


    Read the latest Health Report.