Quantros study challenges reliability of CMS hospital star ratings
Analysis suggests hospitals with ratings of 2, 3 or 4 were more than three times as likely to land in top 10 percent in the country.
New research by healthcare software and services provider Quantros suggests the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' hospital star ratings may not serve as a reliable indicator of clinical quality.
Specifically, the research faces off against the findings of a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Internal Medicine publication. That study proposed that consumers could use CMS' five-star ratings to essentially guide them to better institutions with better clinical quality.
Quantros' analysis suggested that hospitals with star ratings of 2, 3 or 4 were more than three times as likely to land in the top 10 percent in the country than those with 5 stars. One-star hospitals actually outperformed six-star hospitals, with 6 percent having composite scores in the top 10 percent in the nation, compared to 4 percent of 5-star hospitals.
[Also: See how CMS 5-star hospitals stack up in other ratings programs]
Moreover, 47 percent of 5-star hospitals were found to have composite outcome scores below the national average, while 2, 3 and 4-star hospitals comprised the lowest percentage of poor-performing hospitals.
"These findings clearly confirm that consumers cannot safely assume that hospitals with a CMS 5-star rating will provide better clinical quality than other star-rated hospitals," said Dr. Frank Mazza, chief medical officer at Quantros, in a statement.
[Also: Many well-known hospitals fail to score 5 stars in Medicare ratings]
The company offered possible explanations for why their study results differed from those published by JAMA. In Internal Medicine, patient experience ratings were linked with outcomes associated with a completely different patient population, said Quantros. And the JAMA study only assessed patient outcomes for mortality and readmissions across three conditions -- acute myocardial infarction, pneumonia and heart failure -- rather than evaluating a more extensive set of clinical outcomes across all conditions treated by hospitals.
In July, CMS released another star rating system designed to measure the overall quality of hospital care using additional measures beyond patient experiences. Quantros said more research will be needed to validate if these ratings provide a reasonable solution for measuring the quality of hospital care in an equitable manner.
Twitter: @JELagasse
