If you are looking for the best hospitals, the new ranking-based on ‘civic leadership’ might shock you. As usual best performers like Massachusetts General Hospital or the Mayo Clinic aren’t there at the top. This is because earlier rankings were used to avoid the community-minded policy and avoid unnecessary care parameters while ranking hospitals.
So, this new methodology based on doing good activities might force hospitals to focus more on aspects like care beyond the hospital’s boundaries.
Community Centric Ranking
The era of clinical outcome-based performance is nearing an end. The new ‘civic leadership’ based methodology encompasses factors like charity care, financial aid, the value of care. The idea is to make hospitals feel that it is not just about recovery but also about effectiveness while going back to the community.
“It is time for hospitals to rethink what it means to be great,” the Stats News quoted the president of Lown Institute Vikas Saini.
Highlighting the importance of the ‘civic leadership’ Saini, president of the Brookline, Mass., based non-profit think tank told Stat News, that it matters because the health of the people in a hospital’s community “reflects things outside the four walls of a hospital.”
“Hospitals should improve the health of the outside community,” the portal quoted him saying.
Balancing Quality and Care
People applaud the inclusion of civic leadership in the ranking methodology. However, with the apprehension of bundling it with a composite score of hospitals.
“I love that they measure civic leadership,” the portal quoted healthcare management expert from Stanford University School of Medicine, Sara Singer, as saying. However, Sara noted that it should not influence a patient’s choice to get care as against quality.
Overuse of procedure, even when it isn’t required, is a never-ending debate among the medical community. This becomes a problem when social biases, like color and ethnicity, come into play while deciding the procedure.
The low-quality low value vs. high-quality high-value debate is not going to end instantly. But new ranking methodology will definitely push hospitals to rethink and find a balance keeping procedural equality in mind.
