The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released new hospital quality ratings last week, but no Kentucky hospitals received a five-star rating.
The majority of Kentucky hospitals received three stars, sixteen got four stars, twelve got two stars and two facilities got just one star.
The star ratings help families and patients educate themselves about the quality of care at local hospitals. The CMS rated the performance of 3,662 hospitals in seven categories, including deaths, safety of care, patient experience, effectiveness of care, readmission within 30 days, timeliness of care and efficient use of medical imaging.
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Kentucky residents can see ratings for their local hospitals here.
Critics Of Hospital Ratings
Some hospital performance experts claim that the hospital ratings are unreliable because the CMS rates facilities only on the data that they submit. Half of the hospitals that received five stars reported on less than 40 percent of the metrics, according to Dr. Janis Orlowski, chief healthcare officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges.
But the CMS asserts that it used key measures to accurately portray quality of care, such as length of time spent waiting in the ER, complications after hip surgeries, readmission rates after heart attacks and postsurgical infections.
The measures used by the CMS have gone through stringent scientific review and are appropriate for rating hospitals, according to Dr. Kate Goodrich, director of the CMS Center for Clinical Standards and Quality.
Nationally, 102 hospitals received five stars, 934 hospitals received four stars, 1,770 got three stars and 133 facilities received just one star.