Hospital Stats

I was reading this article in the NYTimes about hospitals countrywide being rated based on heart treatment success. I thought "That's a good thing. I wonder which are the best hospitals near my home?" and decided to check...

That's when the disappointment began. Now there's probably a lot more to this study, including some statistics on type of treatments offered with some supposed to be better than others, but I was left wondering "Where's the beef?" Here's one result of my search (click to enlarge):

For Heart Attach Survival Rates it turns out that of the 4477 hospitals in the study countrywide, there were only 17 identified as being above average, and only 7 identified as below average. Yep - leaving 4453 hospitals rated as "no different than the US National Rate". I found this tremendously useful (not), especially since in my state (TN) all 116 hospitals are presumably equally effective at heart attack mortality.

You can go to http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/ to find how hospitals around you rank, but on the mortality stats at least, it's not particularly enlightening unless the good stuff is buried somewhere else that's hard for average-joe consumer to find.

(The reason seems to be requiring a 95% statistical degree of certainty to rank a hospital above or below average, but I'm guessing there was a lot of "politiking" preventing the site from showing data that might give us the data segregated a bit more, even if a lower confidence level needed to be used.)