Best Hospitals 2012-2013

U.S. News & World Report’s annual publication of the Best Hospitals was just released several days ago, and it includes the Honor Roll of 17 hospitals that are considered the best of the best for 2012-2013. Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has displaced Johns Hopkins from the top spot, where it had reigned for 21 years. I have never visited Johns Hopkins, but I used to volunteer as a recreational therapist at MGH in the early 1990s, and it was a top-notch facility. I’ll never forget what I experienced there. Volunteers had to wear bright pink jackets, and all the men felt silly wearing them.

However I might have looked in those pink jackets, my duties as a recreational therapist took me all over the hospital to see the many different units, from patients waiting for organ transplants, orthopedics, and the oncology ward. I made friends with a young model that had lost her hair, and I'd visit her at the Harvard Cyclotron located on campus near the Science Center where she was treated with radiation. Not only did MGH have the latest technology provided by the brightest medical doctors around, they also had an excellent volunteer staff.

MGH is located near many acclaimed medical schools, and this is important for being judged for the U.S. News list of best hospitals. In order to make the Honor Roll, a hospital must be a teaching hospital. This could limit other high performing hospitals from inclusion, but the article clearly states that the purpose of the list is not for regular care. "Best Hospitals' central mission remains unchanged: to help those who need an unusual degree of skilled inpatient care decides where to get it, especially when there's time to make a choice (Comarow, 2012)."

Only 17 hospitals performed well enough to score at the top or near the top in six specialties out of a total of sixteen total specialties. Factors utilized in the scoring include objective data that usually come from the government and includes bed sizes and death rates, and professional opinions from specialists are surveyed for their opinions. "The four basic elements for scoring are reputation, patient survival, patient safety, and care-related factors such as nursing and patient services (Comarow, 2012."

The interesting thing to me is to see this article come out yearly with the same big hospitals on the list. It is not that different than books that publish college rankings. Near the top, not much changes. Sometimes there is a battle between Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and Yale for number one. So, I see this last report more as a marketing strategy to draw in more medical tourism from people that live in other states and countries that are seeking the best care possible, and they can afford it.

One important distinction I immediately noticed was that few of the 17 Honor Roll hospitals were in the top list of Most Connected Hospitals that were recognized for their outstanding achievements in adopting information technology. It makes one wonder how important electronic medical records are to providing quality care. It would be more informative to see if those Most Connected Hospitals have positively correlated outcomes that result from the cost and commitment to the new technology.

References:

Camarow, A. (2012, July 16). Best hospitals 2012-2013: how they were 

     ranked. U.S. News & World Rport. Retrieved from

     http://health.usnews.com/health-news/best-

     hospitals/articles/2012/07/16/best-hospitals-2012-13-how-they-were-
     ranked

Refere
Camarow, A. (2012, July 16). Best hospitals 2012-2013: how they were ranked. U.S. News &
World Rport. Retrieved from http://health.usnews.com/health-news/best-
hospitals/articles/2012/07/16/best-hospitals-2012-13-how-they-were-ranked
nces: