ARIZONA

4 Arizona hospitals get top ratings in patient survey

Ken Alltucker
USA Today
  • The federal government unveiled a new five-star scale that rates hospitals
  • The scale is based on surveys of patients after they are discharged from the hospital
  • Four of Arizona's 64 hospitals rated five stars. No hospital was rated with one%3B the average was three
Todd Tripoli, a simulation technologist, shows off an Anatomage Table used to teach and plan for patient care at Mayo Clino. The hospital received a five-star rating in a recent survey of patients.

Four Arizona hospitals scored the highest ranking of five stars based on the new, simpler measure of patient satisfaction unveiled last week by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS.

None of Arizona's 64 hospitals had the lowest rating of one star.

Mayo Clinic Hospital is the only Phoenix hospital that secured a five-star rating. Banner Goldfield Medical Center in Apache Junction and two East Valley specialty hospitals — Chandler's Arizona Orthopedic Surgical Hospital and Mesa's Arizona Spine and Joint Hospital — were the other five-star recipients.

In all, 19 hospitals had two stars, including hospitals in far-flung communities such as Chinle and Tuba City but also in Phoenix. Maricopa Medical Center, the county health districts' hospital, had two stars, as did three of Abrazo Health Care's metro Phoenix hospitals: Maryvale, Paradise Valley and West Valley.

Most Arizona hospitals landed in the two- to four-star range. Three stars was the rating average for all Arizona hospitals mentioned in survey results.

The ratings are based on CMS surveys of patients polled in 11 categories. Patients were asked to address topics such as how well doctors and nurses communicated with them, whether rooms were clean and quiet, how well hospital staff responded to their needs and whether they would recommend the hospital to others.

CMS has surveyed patients for several years, but the five-star scale is intended as a simplified tool for consumers and patients to compare hospitals. The ratings are posted on CMS' Hospital Compare website, which also carries other measures of quality and effectiveness such as death and readmission rates or average emergency-room wait times.

Valley hospitals say the five-star scale may give consumers an incomplete snapshot of a hospital's operations because it does not track quality and outcomes. Even CMS acknowledges it does not give patients a complete picture, adding that other measures not included in the star ratings, like timeliness or outcomes, may be important.

Nevertheless, hospitals say the star ratings, which will be updated every three months, are an important measure of how consumers perceive the quality of their experience. And hospitals must woo consumers whose insurance plans increasingly limit which hospitals people can access at lower, in-network rates.

"Most patients don't have the data or technical skills to judge quality and safety, so they fall back on service," said Dr. Wyatt Decker, CEO of Mayo Clinic in Arizona. "If the service is good, they equate that to good care."

Though much of Mayo Clinic's focus is on quality and how well a patient fares, Decker said the hospital has paid attention to things like how courteous doctors, nurses and other employees can be and whether the hospital is clean and appealing. Mayo hired an executive who oversees such patient experiences and also contracts with a vendor who surveys Mayo patients.

Banner Health, the state's largest hospital system, had six hospitals rated four stars and four hospitals with a three-star rating, including a teaching hospital, Good Samaritan, which has been renamed Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix.

Banner's three lowest-scoring, two-star hospitals all were purchased over the past year. Those are Banner Casa Grande Medical Center, and Tucson's Banner-University Medical Center South and Banner-University Medical Center Tucson.

Becky Kuhn, Banner's executive vice president of community delivery, said Banner has trained staff and made other changes since acquiring the Casa Grande hospital in June. It also expects to make similar changes at the Tucson hospitals.

Kuhn said that Banner has its own set of internal measures that it strives to meet, so it does not prioritize any publicly available grading system.

There is a dizzying array of ratings systems, all using their own methods of evaluating hospitals and doctors. U.S. News & World Report, Consumer Reports, the Leapfrog Group, ZocDoc, HealthGrades and others all promote their own methodologies and collectively report, at times, conflicting results.

For example, Banner-University Medical Center Tucson scored two stars and Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix had three stars, but both were named to the Becker's Hospital Review list of the 100 Great Hospitals in America. Scottsdale Shea also made Becker's list.

"We enjoy and appreciate when outside groups recognize us, but we always start with our own data and identify where we need to focus our attention," Kuhn said.

Decker said that it is difficult to keep all of the ratings straight. Some ratings groups even charge hospitals if they seek to promote their score.

With such a confusing and conflicting number of rating systems, Decker said consumers face a difficult task in choosing reliable options.

"We get awards from rating systems that I didn't even know existed," Decker said.

Kaiser Health News contributed to this article.