Electronic Health Reporter

Healthgrades released its 2022 Healthgrades Ratings and Specialty Excellence Awards. The ratings assess hospital performance across 31 of the most common procedures and conditions. The awards recognize superior clinical performance in 17 specialty areas and include a new category for overall surgical care. This list of all award recipients is available here.

As part of its analysis, Healthgrades has also released The 2022 Healthgrades Specialty Excellence Report: The Continuing Importance of Quality, which provides an in-depth review and data analysis to show how Americans can use quality ratings to find better specialty care. The report also includes insights from the ongoing Healthgrades COVID-19 Patient Confidence Study.

“Every American should use this information to help them decide where to seek specialty care,” said Brad Bowman, MD, chief medical officer and head of data science of Healthgrades. “Healthgrades also provides the tools for hospitals to understand how well they perform compared with other local, regional and national hospitals—and to make improvements accordingly.”

Quality data for objective measures of excellence

The 2022 Healthgrades Specialty Excellence Awards recognize hospitals that deliver superior patient outcomes across the most common in-hospital procedures and conditions, including surgical care, critical care, cardiac care and surgery, gastrointestinal care and surgery, bariatric surgery, and 10 other specialties. Full methodology is available here.

?   The awards take into consideration Medicare patient data from 2018-2020 (excluding any patient with a COVID-19 diagnosis).

?   Healthgrades independently analyzes each short-term acute care hospital in the country—about 4,500 hospitals. Hospitals can’t opt into or out of the analysis.

?   Ratings are determined by actual clinical performance, including patient mortality or in-hospital complications. The ratings and awards do not take into consideration hospital reputation, financial information, perception, or predicted performance.

?   Healthgrades uses a risk-adjusted statistical model so hospitals with sicker patient populations are assessed based on their unique patient mix.

Patients fare significantly better at high-performing hospitals

The results of the Healthgrades analysis have some startling ramifications. For example, from 2018-2020:

?   The risk of having a complication in a knee replacement surgery is 74.0% lower at a hospital with a 5-star rating than being treated in a hospital with a 1-star rating*

?   Patients treated for Heart Attack in hospitals with 1-star for in-hospital mortality are, on average, 2 times more likely to die than if they were treated in hospitals with 5-stars for in-hospital mortality.*

?   If all hospitals performed as well as the hospitals with 5-star ratings 218,141 lives could potentially have been saved, and 156,050 health complications could potentially have been avoided*

All ratings information is published on healthgrades.com, indicating which hospitals are 1, 3 or 5 star for each of the rated specialties. Patients can view hospital profiles to see how hospitals are performing relative to other local options.

“Hospital quality ratings should be transparent and easily accessible so that all Americans can make the most informed decision about where they receive care,” said Brad Graner, President, Healthgrades. “Many people don’t realize that there is significant variation in quality among hospitals.  Healthgrades is leading the way to make hospital quality information transparent and accessible so that all Americans can make the most informed decision about where they receive care.”

Three-quarters of surveyed Americans are very comfortable participating in medical related activities

Despite pandemic-related drops in confidence for activities like air travel and attending large public events, 76% of Americans are comfortable with healthcare-related activities like visiting their primary care physician, going to an urgent care facility, and having in-office medical procedures, according to the Healthgrades COVID-19 Patient Confidence Study. The study also found that:

?   Most patients have not changed the frequency that they visit their health care providers, ~70% report that the frequency of their HCP visits have either increased or remained the same since the pandemic began.

?   A majority of Americans—60%—say quality of care is more important to them now than it was before the pandemic began.

To learn more, read the Healthgrades 2022 Specialty Excellence Report here.