Monday, September 11, 2006

Medical Care – When Only The Best Will Do

resources to rely on

How Does Your

Hospital Rate?



You sprain your thumb while attempting to wrestle the lid from the kosher dills on Sunday. By Wednesday even the bottle of squeezable mayonnaise is mocking your feeble attempts at self-feeding. What do you do? Hustle yourself on down to the local clinic, sheepishly confess you were bench pressing fifty pounds too much when your thumb gave way, and head home with a fashionable splint that gets you back in the food game. But…

What if you need treatment for a rare cancer, an unusual kidney disease or a neurosurgical procedure that is both delicate and dangerous? Where do you turn when the decisions you make about your treatment may impact your life as significantly as the illness itself? When the medical need is complex the local clinic simply will not suffice.

Resources to research medical providers are abundant. So abundant, in fact, it quickly becomes almost impossible to decipher – how do we choose among the thousands of options available at the click of a mouse? As with many tasks in life, it’s not about the homework assignment but about who has the best set of CliffsNotes. In this case, that very well may be U.S. News and World Report.

Each year U.S. News and World Report publishes a list of the best hospitals in the country. This is no fluff piece of journalism. Of the more than 5,000 facilities evaluated last year only 176 qualified for their Honor Roll. They also provide disease specific ratings, identifying the top hospitals in each of sixteen subspecialty areas including Cancer, Neurology, Heart Surgery, Endocrinology and Orthopedics.

You’ll find the report both detailed and digestible. The Honor Roll provides an overall ranking of hospitals and is a great jumping off point to determine which highly ranked providers are located in your region. The sub-specialty sections rank the top fifty hospitals by both overall score and a subset of criteria such as Reputation, Mortality and Nursing Index.

The online report can be found at: Best Hospital 2006 Report.

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Tim,

I have often wondered that exact question: where should I go for the best of the best. Something at the local level would be interesting, too. Best in KC, for example. Thanks for your quirky and entertaining bursts of information.

Truly,

Sylvia C.

http://sylvias-journal.blogspot.com/

7:46 PM  

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