Hospital rankings mixed in region
Gordon Hospital gets five stars, while Redmond has four and FMC gets three.
Redmond gets four stars, and Floyd Medical Center gets three.
A federal health care agency has released its first overall star ratings for the quality of hospitals, and just two Georgia facilities earned the top five-star designation: Gordon Hospital in Calhoun, and Northside Medical Center in Columbus.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rated 3,617 hospitals on a scale of one to five stars. Almost half received three stars, the average score, reported Kaiser Health News, while only 102 earned five stars.
Redmond Regional and Cartersville medical centers received four stars and Floyd Medical Center received three. Polk Medical Center is too small to be included.
In Georgia, five hospitals received the lowest score of one star: Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta; the Medical College of Georgia Hospitals and Clinics in Augusta; Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany; Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge; and WellStar Atlanta Medical Center.
The rating includes quality measures for routine care — such as when patients are being treated for a heart attack or pneumonia — to quality measures that focus on hospital-acquired infections.
The hospital industry nationally has fought against the release of the ratings, saying that the facilities that treat the most difficult medical cases were put at a disadvantage. But Medicare maintained that consumers need an easy-to-understand way to judge the quality of hospitals.
The American Hospital Association said Wednesday the ratings “are not ready for prime time.”
And Georgia Hospital Association President Earl Rogers said in a statement, “We are concerned that the CMS hospital star rating oversimplifies the complexity of delivering high-quality care and creates more confusion for the health consumer.”
He said the “one-sizefits-all approach” penalizes teaching hospitals and hospitals that serve a disproportionate share of uninsured patients.
Redmond’s Andrea Pitts, director of marketing and public relations, said in a statement that hospital officials review a variety of information as they seek out opportunities to improve.
“We also encourage patients to use a variety of resources — including their provider and family members — to make informed decisions about their care,” she said.
Floyd Medical Center also provided a statement, saying, “it is important for patients and their families to remember that one score does not provide the whole or even the most recent quality story.”
Healthgrades currently ranks FMC in the top 5 percent nationally for patient safety, the hospital reported.
CMS said it used 64 quality-of-care measures already reported on its Hospital Compare website and summarized them into a single rating.
CMS used data from both Medicare patients and those covered by private insurance.
Chris Kane, a consultant with DHG Healthcare, said safety-net hospitals and academic medical centers may have some merit in their arguments that they are treated unfairly in the ratings.
Still, Kane added that the Hospital Compare process “may be imperfect but it is an appropriate initiative to combine the key variables: quality, cost and customer service.”
A Grady official said Wednesday he agreed with industry statements about a bias against safety-net and teaching hospitals.
Rome News-Tribune Managing Editor Mike Colombo contributed to this report. Georgia Health News, a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, tracks state medical issues on its website georgiahealthnews.com.