When I wrote last week about how
journalists should use caution when covering hospital rankings, ratings and
report cards, I didn’t appreciate how good my timing was.

Days later, the hospital accrediting group
The Joint Commission labeled 1,099 hospitals as “top performers” —
close to double the number from the year before.

“These results are more than
numbers,” the group’s president and CEO Mark Chassin
said, according
to a story by HealthLeaders Media.

“They mean better care for the millions of Americans who
require surgery, or who are hospitalized with heart attack, heart failure,
stroke, or pneumonia. They mean better care for children coping with asthma,
better inpatient psychiatric treatment, increased rates of immunization, and
better prevention of dangerous blood clots known as venous
thromboembolism.”

And then Monday, the Healthcare
Association of New York State issued its own report card on hospital
ratings, measuring their utility and finding many of them deficient. Among
those that didn’t meet the grade were some of the most prominent ratings: U.S.
News and World Reports, the Leapfrog Group, HealthGrades
and Consumer Reports. Among those that did: The Joint Commission.

“We had been hearing more and more from members their
general frustration of all the different report cards,” said Kathleen Ciccone, director of HANYS’ Quality Institute, according to
a Kaiser
Health News story. “It’s so time consuming for them to be able to respond
to the reports, to be able to see what’s useful about them. They’re really
looking for some guidance on how to use the information.”

The Kaiser story notes that, “By at least one criterion, the
HANYS report on report card falls short of its own standards: HANYS did not
give the ratings groups an opportunity to preview the report before
publication.”

Longtime health reporter Trudy Lieberman wrote
on her Center for Advancing Health blog that she remains skeptical the
report cards amount to much:

The take-aways: people are not
about to fish around for a hospital when they need a hospital procedure,
especially one that is not elective, and they want to be near family and
friends. Where does that leave hospital ratings? When it comes to usefulness,
ratings are probably no more helpful than they were 20 years ago when
marketplace consumerism attempted to gain a toehold in health care.

Lieberman wrote that the best
advice she’s heard about hospital care came from Don Berwick, founder of the Institute
for Healthcare Improvement and past administrator of the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services: When you go to the hospital, take someone with you and get
out quickly.

I continue to believe that reporters should tread with
caution. As report cards proliferate, we may just throw up our arms and cry
uncle.