Penalties For 'Worst' Hospitals Could Hurt Minorities : Shots - Health Blog : NPR: Rating the best hospitals has become commonplace, with U.S. News & World Report, various research firms and lots of websites routinely issuing rankings.
Now some health researchers have come up with a way to evaluate which hospitals are the worst. In a paper just published in the policy journal Health Affairs, three researchers classified 3,229 hospitals by quality, using Medicare's reports of how often each hospital followed recommended guidelines of care for basic things like giving heart attack patients aspirin upon admission.
Next, the researchers evaluated the hospitals by how much they spent providing care. Combining the two ratings, they identified 178 low-quality, high-cost institutions. With refreshing bluntness, they designated those as the "worst" hospitals.
