CMS Star Ratings Highlight Need to Compare Performance by Hospital Type
Understanding what drives performance
As the marketplace for health care grows increasingly complex, organizations must develop a greater understanding of what drives performance to remain competitive.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently published its newest Star Ratings, designed to measure and report hospital quality. These ratings have provoked a number of questions and concerns as more than 3,600 hospitals – regardless of size, breadth of services, or geographic location – are benchmarked against a collective average.
SullivanCotter was recently featured in a Modern Healthcare article which addresses these differences. As organizations use these ratings to help drive improvement efforts, it is important to consider the following:
- Using national benchmarks like the CMS Star Ratings can be a great way for hospitals nationwide to help drive quality improvement, but only if they understand the nuances and complexities in the data and how to best analyze it.
- Not all hospitals are the same. To truly identify areas of meaningful improvement, hospitals must be compared to like hospitals.
- Organizations cannot improve what they cannot measure, and the new CMS Star Ratings continue to provide transparency in health care quality and performance as the industry shifts from volume to value.
- To drive improvement efforts and help organizations more effectively benchmark performance against their direct peers, the market requires a standard set of national quality metrics that is stratified by hospital type.