Government Healthcare Policy, Business and Technology

As CMS Updates its Quality Ratings for Hospitals, Experts Question Their Validity

Healthcare Informatics: Last week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published the first release of its overall hospital quality star ratings that the government says reflects comprehensive quality information about the care provided at U.S. hospitals.

Indeed, the new overall hospital quality star rating methodology takes 64 existing quality measures already reported on the agency’s Hospital Compare website and summarizes them into a unified rating of one to five stars. As written by Kate Goodrich, M.D., director of center for clinical standards and quality at CMS, at the time of the release of the ratings, “The rating includes quality measures for routine care that the average individual receives, such as care received when being treated for heart attacks and pneumonia, to quality measures that focus on hospital-acquired infections, such as catheter-associated urinary tract infections. Specialized and cutting edge care that certain hospitals provide such as specialized cancer care, are not reflected in these quality ratings.”

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