Interesting! Find out what local hospitals stink.
From this NYT magazine article.
Interesting! Find out what local hospitals stink.
From this NYT magazine article.
That is interesting. I compared the two hospitals closest to me...while they have high marks for most of the surgical / treatment items, they both really were lousy in the patient polling (50-60% on average), which about sums up my experience at both.
bottom line, they treat the problem, but are lousy with patients.
Was this your doctor?
Well all things considered its far better then the other way around.Originally Posted by Tman
I'd flip that around and say that the patients are lousy with the doctors. There's a serious problem with entitlement, people treating their medical care as if they're getting a combo meal at Burger King and they don't want no stinking pickles.
Took a look at heart events for my area. There's no survival statistics, no outcomes. Polling year 2000 and then seeing who's still alive would help. However, that doesn't take in to account what followup maintenance care they receive from their physician.
I noticed 2 hospitals in NYC area treated heart attacks with a median payment of $2000 whereas the rest of the hospitals were closer to $10000. I asked someone who had worked at one of the lower-cost ones (Bronx-Lebanon) for which procedures account for the $8000. He told me they do exploratory caths, and then discharge patient.
They don't do the angioplasty (balloon to clean up), nor heart surgery. Whether the angioplasties are necessary or not are an entirely different ball of cheese (there's a very interesting old study suggesting that even thought Canadians do not do all these angioplasties the outcomes are similar to USA patients.)
I am assuming (unlike private insurance) all hospitals in the same geographic region get paid the same amount for the same procedure under Medicare Part A. This data then only shows the amount of 'services rendered' on the average patient. It's missing the very tasty outcome data. I suppose this is one of the reasons some agencies are pushing for electronic medical records, so they can do the whole 'pay for performance' deal (which I am a bit dubious about, it sounds too flashy)
Now, if I were a patient picking a hospital like the NYT article suggests, and I had unlimited funding (or generous health ins), I would probably pick the hospitals that treat the highest amount of patients for that condition (to stay in practice), and the ones who charge medicare the most (they have fanciest equipment and more staff.) Which is kinda counterproductive.
Very very interesting. Thanks for posting the link.
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