The moment you enter the entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, you simply can’t miss all the signs reminding you that Hopkins is ranked No. 1 hospital in the US by U.S. News & World Report. Hopkins is justifiably very pleased of reaching that best position year after year, but does it mean anything for patient safety and quality of attention?

A recent report in Annals of Internal Medicine finds that for the 50 top-ranked hospitals, there is little correlation between their U.S. News rank and any objective measures of quality of treatment. But when the authors analyzed the numbers, they discovered the hospital’s subjective popularity among medical doctors made up 90 to 100 percent of the hospital’s overall U.S. News ranking. Put simply, the word of mouth popularity of the hospital among physicians — not among patients — counts for a huge amount of the news magazine’s popular ratings system.

Locating the right hospital is not uncomplicated. But there are some simple guidelines. Focus on the brand-name hospitals like Hopkins only if you have an exotic issue that very few medical doctors have ever seen.

In its 20 years of rating hospitals, U.S. News has never questioned a single patient what they think; its ratings of a hospital’s popularity in a specific specialty is based only on what medical professionals in that specialty believe. However now Medicare has started requiring hospitals to have patients fill out a standardized survey when they leave the hospital, and the questions center on a lot of problems that people care about and have a massive influence on the quality and safety of their care, such as:

Did the medical doctors and nurses always communicate well? Was the bathroom always clean? Was your pain always well-controlled? Was the area around your room always quiet at night?

Note that little word “always.” These are things patients have a right to expect – always.

You will discover that a lot of community hospitals do a far better job than the mega-hospitals of taking care of patients in the ways that patients notice.

Our VA medical malpractice lawyers understand what happens to victims and their families: not just the big medical bills and the lost pay that go with severe injuries, but the emotions that happen too. Talk to our experienced VA medical malpractice lawyers about your situation.

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