News: Quality varies among affiliates of U.S. News & World Report’s honor roll hospitals, study finds

Surgical outcomes at hospitals on U.S. News & World Report’s honor roll are not considerably better than those at non-honor roll hospitals, a new study from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found. Additionally, within hospital networks, the risk-adjusted rates for all outcomes varied wildly across affiliated hospitals.

The researchers studied 87 hospitals that participated in one of the 16 networks affiliated with U.S. News & World Report’s honor roll. The study used data from Medicare beneficiaries who were undergoing colectomies, coronary artery bypass grafts, or hip replacements between 2005 and 2014 to evaluate the variation in risk-adjusted surgical outcomes at honor roll and affiliated hospitals within and across the network, according to the survey report.

While in some respects honor roll hospitals fared better than non-honor roll hospitals, they were not consistently better. For example, honor roll hospitals had lower failure to rescue (i.e., the inability to prevent death after the development of a complication) rates (13.3% versus 15.1%), but higher complication rates (22.1% versus 18.0%). Across networks, the differences in failure to rescue rates varied by as little as 12.7%-14.3% to as much as 7.6%-37.3%; complication rates varied by 21%-23% to 6%-26%, according to the researchers.

What this means, the researchers said, is that potential patients cannot trust the quality of a hospital based on its affiliate’s placement on the honor roll. The researchers also suggested that public reporting lists should provide patients with information on the quality of all network-affiliated hospitals and networks should monitor the outcome differences across the system, seeking to correct and improve.

In response to the survey results, Ben Harder, chief of health analysis at U.S. News said on Twitter that these findings are exactly the reason the honor roll evaluates individual facilities rather than entire hospital systems.

Editor’s note: To read the full study from JAMA, click here. To read Harder’s response on Twitter and the resulting conversation, click here. To read about another recent JAMA study evaluating the quality of care at ranked hospitals, click here.