No hospitals in Pima County scored more than three stars out of five under a new federal government rating system based on patient input.
The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on Thursday for the first time introduced the star ratings on Hospital Compare, which is the agency’s public information website about hospitals. A similar website, Nursing Home Compare, gives star ratings to nursing homes that accept Medicare.
The centers also recently added star ratings to the Dialysis Facility Compare site to help to make data on dialysis centers easier to understand and use.
Three Tucson-area hospitals — Carondelet St. Joseph’s, Oro Valley Hospital and Tucson Medical Center — received three stars out of five in the new Hospital Compare results.
Ensuring a positive patient experience is an ongoing endeavor at Tucson Medical Center and something the hospital takes very seriously, said registered nurse Heather Bachmann, TMC’s director of patient experience.
“We will continue to work diligently on initiatives that provide the patient experience that our community deserves,” she said, reacting to the ratings.
The federal website released ratings on a total of seven Medicare-certified Tucson acute care community hospitals. The star system is part of a larger effort under the Affordable Care Act to give the public more information about hospital quality and patient safety.
The other four Tucson-area hospitals rated — Carondelet St. Mary’s, Northwest Medical Center, Banner-University Medical Center Tucson and Banner-University Medical Center South — received two stars.
Nineteen percent of the 3,553 U.S. hospitals that were rated earned scores of two stars or less, an analysis by Kaiser Health News found.
Dr. Robert Groves, chief medical officer of Banner Health’s University Medicine Division, said the Phoenix-based company, which moved into the Tucson market in March, welcomes the transparency of the public ratings. He noted that longtime Banner hospitals in other parts of Arizona showed some strong results.
“You could say that clinical improvement is in Banner’s organizational DNA. We are looking forward to bringing our quality improvement initiatives to Tucson,” he said.
The Kaiser Health News analysis found that 251 hospitals in the country (7 percent of those rated) received five stars.
Four hospitals in Arizona received five stars, all of them in the Phoenix area. They are: Arizona Orthopedic Surgical & Specialty in Chandler; Arizona Spine & Joint Hospital in Mesa; Banner Goldfield Medical Center in Apache Junction; and the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix.
The star ratings relate to patients’ experience of care at Medicare-certified acute care hospitals in the country between July 2013 and June 2014. The ratings are based on data from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey measures that are included in Hospital Compare.
The 11 measures include how well nurses and doctors communicated with patients, how responsive hospital staffers were to patient needs, how clean and quiet hospital environments were, and how well patients were prepared for post-hospital settings.
The star ratings will be updated each quarter.
Federal officials stressed the ratings are merely one measure of hospital quality and that a one-star rating “does not mean that you will receive poor care from a hospital.”
Rather, it means that hospitals that received two or more stars performed better on this particular measure of patient experience and that, “for this reason, we suggest that you use the star rating along with other quality information when making decisions about choosing a hospital,” Hospital Compare says.
Star ratings could be an effective way to make quality information easier to understand, but the system risks oversimplifying the complexity of quality care, said Akin Demehin, senior associate director of policy for the American Hospital Association.
“Patients should use all available resources at their disposal — including their health-care providers — to identify which health-care decisions are right for them,” Demehin said.
