A tool for patients and advocates: Hospital error rates

A new publicly available resource shows individual hospitals’ quality ratings, so you can identify the best hospital near you. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services gathers the information from hospitals across the country and posts it here. The database shows graphs on the treatment of patients with heart conditions and pneumonia, and those undergoing surgery.

Advice: When it’s not raining the roof doesn’t leak, and when it’s raining, it’s too late to go and fix the roof. That’s especially true for personal health issues. That’s why you should take a few minutes now, and pick out the best hospital nearby. That way, in an emergency, you’ll know where to go.

Public Policy Minute: Hopefully, the public availability of quality measures will stimulate hospital leaders to compete on quality. Paul Levy, the head of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, hopes so, and has posted many measures on a new BIDMC web site. Beth Israel shows up among the top hospitals on all but three of the 21 measures that can be viewed on the CMS database, among its 12 neighboring hospitals. Bravo, Paul!


Not all quality contests are as fair and accurate as CMS’. Read a story of a medical error by a physician who won an award that was not carefully made, or read Paul Levy’s blog post on the public posting of BIDMC’s quality measures.