The data fueling any hospital ranking system matters immensely. Understanding where the data comes from and how it is used to assess performance are paramount in grasping the significance of the awards.
Data Source
Hospital performance is assessed based on data from over 630+ million discharges from general, acute, and non-federal facilities throughout all 50 states.
Clinical Categories
Hospitals can be scored in 39 different clinical categories, depending on the care provided at the hospital. There are three “Overall” categories – Overall Hospital Care, Overall Medical Care, and Overall Surgical Care – and 36 categories that are focused on more specific areas of care such as Orthopedic Care, Joint Replacement, Cardiac Care, and Heart Failure Treatment. Click here to see a complete list of clinical categories.
Risk-Adjusted Data
Each patient is unique, which means some patients have a much higher risk for experiencing an adverse event than other patients do. Bluebook Quantros risk adjusts the patient data to create an even playing field when scoring and ranking hospitals.
To demonstrate the need for risk adjustment, consider the following example:
During the same time frame, more adverse events occurred at Hospital A than Hospital B. This could be due to the care provided, or it could be due to the complexity of Hospital A’s patients. In this scenario, without risk adjusting, Hospital A would receive a lower score then Hospital B.
Bluebook Quantros’ risk adjustment methodology considers each hospital’s patient population to ensure a fair comparison.
Quality Outcome Measures
Providers can receive CareChex awards for outstanding performance in Medical Excellence and in Patient Safety. The Medical Excellence awards are based on three objective, quantifiable measures, and all are weighted equally when calculating hospital scores: Mortality, Complications, and Readmissions. The Patient Safety awards are based solely on performance in the patient safety measure.
These awards do not take into consideration patient satisfaction surveys, physician surveys, or self-reported data. Both survey and self-reported data suffer from a wide variety of well-known reporting-based biases, and results derived from them are not necessarily associated with better outcomes.
Hospitals that receive CareChex awards do so because of their strong performance in outcomes.
