Order photos

Medicare’s Hospital Compare website rates your local hospital care

by | Apr 11, 2019 | Opinion

Have you wondered how your area hospitals stack up in terms of the quality of care they provide?

Emergencies obviously call for rushing to the nearest hospital. But when you have time to plan, it is worth doing some research and finding out which hospitals do the best job of caring for their patients.

Medicare’s Hospital Compare website – at medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html – has made it easier for you to check that. The site has overall star ratings to help you better understand which hospitals are top performers, which are average and which need improvement.  The ratings range from one to five stars, with five being the best.

The Hospital Compare site already enjoys a solid reputation with the public, showing how thousands of hospitals scored on various indicators of quality care. You can compare hospitals on the basis of such factors as clinical outcomes, customer satisfaction and patient safety.

The just-updated overall star ratings offer a snapshot of particular hospitals’ quality of care, by summing up individual measures of hospital performance already posted on the website. The ratings reflect such factors as how often patients get infections after surgery, how long patients must wait in the emergency department before seeing a doctor or nurse, and how likely patients are to get readmitted to the hospital after a heart attack.

Medicare assigned stars to 3,725 Medicare-certified hospitals nationwide. Another 848 couldn’t be included, mostly because they didn’t have enough data to properly evaluate them. They may have been too new or too small and, therefore, had too few cases on which to base ratings. The ratings are updated regularly on the website, as the government continues to collect the most recent data.

Nationally, 293 hospitals received five stars, 1,086 rated four stars, 1,264 scored three stars, 800 received two stars, and 282 had just one star.

The 266 rated Texas hospitals scored an average of 3.2 stars for overall quality of care. Twenty-four hospitals received five stars, 84 rated four stars, 95 scored three stars, 53 received two stars, and 10 had just one star.

Area Texas hospitals that received Medicare’s top rating of five stars include: Baylor Medical Center in Frisco, Baylor Scott and White Heart and Vascular Hospital in Dallas, Baylor Scott and White Surgical Hospital in Sherman, Methodist Hospital for Surgery in Addison, North Central Surgical Center in Dallas, Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital of Southwest Fort Worth ane Heart Hospital Baylor Plano.

Here are the scores for area hospitals:

Greenville – Hunt Regional Medical Center – 3 stars

McKinney – Baylor Scott and White Medical Center McKinney – 3 stars

McKinney – Methodist McKinney Hospital — 4 stars 

McKinney – Medical Center of McKinney — 2 stars

Sherman – Baylor Scott and White Surgical Hospital at Sherman – 5 stars

Sherman – Wilson N. Jones Regional Medical Center – 3 stars

Other Texas hospitals’ star ratings can be found at medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html.

By using star ratings on its Compare websites, Medicare is trying to help you make more informed decisions about your health care. The public reporting also gives low-performing providers a compelling incentive to improve their practices and procedures and, hence, their scores.

Nursing Home Compare, Home Health Compare and the Medicare Plan Finder also use star ratings to help you check out health care providers and choose one with quality in mind.

Of course, as informative as these websites can be, they can’t tell the whole story about where to go for care. They’re simply a screening tool that lets you focus on a few providers that interest you.

Visit with your doctor about the best hospital for you. Research shows that some hospitals do better than others at treating certain conditions. And talk to family members and friends about what they liked or disliked about their recent hospital stays and which facilities they’d recommend.

Medicare also recently updated its “Guide to Choosing a Hospital,” which includes a checklist of questions to ask your doctor and explains how to find the hospital that’s the right fit for you. A free copy can be downloaded at medicare.gov or requested by calling Medicare at 1-800-633-4227.

Once you’ve done your homework, you’ll have peace of mind knowing you’ve made an informed choice about your care. Then you can concentrate on the rest of your preparations for your hospital stay.

 

For more like this, see the April 11 issue or subscribe online.

 

By Bob Moos, the Southwest public affairs officer for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Rotary Golf 2024

0 Comments

Related News

Texas counties among nations’s fastest growing

Texas counties among nations’s fastest growing

Recent estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that six of the 10 fastest-growing counties in the United States from 2022 to 2023 were in Texas. According to the Texas Tribune, Kaufman County, just east of Dallas, led the list with a 7.6% increase in new...

read more
Read this. Build a stronger community.

Read this. Build a stronger community.

Saddened. Embarrassed. Determined. These three words evoke distinct feelings and emotions. In the context of an opinion piece we ran in the paper four and a half years ago, they described the aftermath of a community that lost its newspaper. After 130 years in...

read more
Just like mom used to make

Just like mom used to make

Men have man caves because they want the room they had as a kid back. They also spend the rest of their days trying to find the recipes of their favorite childhood dishes. The ones like their mom used to make. By John Moore For more on this story see the March 7, 2024...

read more
Pet ownership: A lifetime commitment

Pet ownership: A lifetime commitment

He was crossing the road. Over and over. I was surprised someone hadn’t hit him with their car. I was also surprised the coyotes hadn’t gotten him. It was 9 o’clock at night and according to the residents of the small strip of country road, he’d been out there for a...

read more
Hold, please

Hold, please

It appears that telephone landlines may be on their way out. CNN Business reported that recently, AT&T applied for a waiver in the state of California to stop servicing traditional landlines. Both AT&T and Verizon have both said they want to move away from...

read more
Dewey or don’t we?

Dewey or don’t we?

On Christmas Eve 2008, there were just three of us working in the office. Well, technically, there was one of us working, the other two were there. A couple of the young ladies on staff either didn’t have enough vacation time built up or they were saving it for...

read more
A range of options

A range of options

My great grandparents lived on a homestead. They cooked on a wood stove. Most of us today have no idea how good we’ve got it. For my great grandparents’ generation, remodeling the kitchen meant picking a different place to stack the wood. By John Moore For more on...

read more
A word from our sponsors

A word from our sponsors

Commercials used to be great. They used to be an art form. They used to be fun. Today’s advertising is boring in comparison. Television commercials were something to which I looked forward when I was a kid. Some were better developed and more interesting than the...

read more
On the road again

On the road again

We often hear someone say they just want to leave the world a better place than they found it. That’s a great goal, but rarely is it the case. Unless you were Charles Kuralt. For those of us who grew up during his time on the CBS News segment, On The...

read more
Subscribe Love