Each release of new overall hospital ratings is captivating to journalists, hospital leaders, and health care consumers in the United States. These overall ratings, whether published by U.S. News, Consumer Reports, or Hospital Compare, aggregate a wide array of underlying measures into a single score for each hospital. Without such composite scores, it would be impossible to create rankings, star ratings, and “honor rolls” based on overall performance. As every hospital chief executive (and college president) knows, boards of directors rarely ignore these ratings.…
The remainder of this commentary is available at nejm.com.
Juliet Rumball-Smith is director of Health Intelligence & Translational Medicine, Northland District Health Board; Jill Gurvey is a research programmer at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation; and Mark W. Friedberg is a senior physician policy researcher at RAND.
This commentary originally appeared on New England Journal of Medicine on August 30, 2018. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
