Big Name Hospitals Don't Guarantee Quality Surgical Care

Getting surgery at a big name hospital does not necessarily mean you will receive better care; patients should be more about how long people stay at the hospital post-op and how likely they will come out alive, Reuters reports.

According to Reuters, the publisher measured two aspects of care: "the percentage of Medicare patients who died in the hospital during or after
their surgery, and the percentage who stayed in the hospital longer than expected based on standards of care for their condition."
"Both are indicators of complications and overall quality of care," said Dr John Santa, medical director of Consumer Reports Health.

Some of the nationally recognized hospitals in the U.S. were given mediocre ratings, according to Reuters:
"The Cleveland Clinic, some Mayo Clinic hospitals in Minnesota, and Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, for instance, rated no better than midway between "better" and "worse" on the CU scale, worse than many small hospitals. Because CU had only limited access to data, the ratings also underline the difficulty patients have finding objective information on the quality of care at a given facility."
Officials believe the report is the step in the right direction to encourage patients to be proactive when seeking medial treatments.

"To whatever extent you can empower patients to get better care and become partners in pushing the healthcare system to make improvements is to the good," Paul Levy, former president of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who was not involved in the project, told Reuters.
CU's ratings use data of Medicare claims and clinical records from 2009 to 2011 for 86 kinds of surgery.  The report took into account some hospitals treat older or sicker patients, and exclude data on patients who were transferred from other hospitals