Opinion: How to save the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals rankings
To be useful to patient and providers, rating systems must move past monolithic systems that only focus on hospital care and use older and limited data.
U.S. News & World Report recently issued its 2023-24 Best Hospitals ratings. The ratings come at a time of increased scrutiny and skepticism of ranking systems. In very public ways, many colleges, law schools, and medical schools have declined to participate in the U.S. News process, while some hospitals have expressed their desire to abandon the rankings as well. These stakeholders’ concerns center on the purpose of these ranking systems and whether their methodologies serve the best interests of consumers.
That second point is particularly crucial when it comes to medicine. Now is the time for health care ratings to offer patients transparent and useful measures of quality that enable informed choices.
What's Your Reaction?
