CMS Hospital Compare Site To Add Ratings
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
A five-star rating system will soon be available on the Hospital Compare website with the goal of driving transparency.
The CMS Hospital Compare Website will soon add star ratings systems in an effort to improve transparency. According to Modern Healthcare , CMS first used ratings for nursing homes in 2008 and, in 2014, applied ratings to health providers, large group practices, and dialysis facilities.
iHealth Beat reports the new hospital rating system will offer a star rating based on the 11 publicly reported measures in the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey. The survey assesses patient experiences, which CMS will convert into ratings.
Not everyone believes this effort at transparency is a smart move though with the American Hospital Association warning this information could cause confusion. “A single star rating has the potential to oversimplify the information about quality that might be most relevant to patients,” said Akin Demehin, AHA's senior associate director of policy. “Frankly, if they arrive at a methodology that is a significant departure from what will be publicly displayed this month, it can actually lead to a great deal of confusion among providers and patients.”
CMS is also developing another star-rating methodology which, according to Demehin, would apply to all the other measures on Hospital Compare such as readmission rates, number of complications, and spending per beneficiary.
Ratings from CMS would not be the only ones potentially causing confusion. Health IT Outcomes reported in March that hospital ratings vary widely between websites and, in extreme cases, hospitals that were ranked at the top of the list on some websites were ranked poorly on others.
“The lack of agreement among the national hospital rating systems is likely explained by the fact that each system uses its own rating methods, has a different focus to its ratings, and stresses different measures of performance,” wrote researchers.