When seeking hospital care, consumers know to look for quality and reputation. But it’s equally important for them to understand the disparity in performance between local area hospitals for specific conditions and procedures. The Healthgrades 2020 Report to the Nation analyzes the performance of nearly 4,500 hospitals nationwide, measured by risk-adjusted mortality and complication rates. According to the report, if all hospitals as a group performed similarly to hospitals rated 5-stars, on average 220,019 lives could potentially have been saved and 149,403 complications could potentially have been avoided.
This year’s report identifies the top-performing hospitals — namely those where outcomes are statistically significantly better than expected. Healthgrades is also publishing the full list of Specialty Excellence AwardTM recipients. This list provides greater transparency for consumers, physicians, and healthcare professionals by surfacing top hospital performers in key specialties nationwide. See the list.
To understand how consumers viewed hospital and physician quality when making care decisions, we surveyed more than 1,200 users of Healthgrades.com. These insights highlight that consumers’ primary focus when selecting a provider is a combination of quality and reputation. In fact, 97.1% of respondents said that they consider quality when selecting a hospital.
But Healthgrades understands that quality improvement is a difficult task for hospitals, requiring considerable time, energy, and resource investments. To discern what goes into achieving and sustaining quality, we also asked hospital executives and clinical leaders how their approach to quality improvement has evolved over the last 10 years. Their responses, and our experience based on years partnering with thousands of hospitals across the country, can also be found in this report.
Read the Report to the Nation
