Consumer Reports Dives into Healthcare Ratings

Consumer Reports magazine announced it's getting into the growing business of publishing public ratings of hospitals and private physicians. It's only the latest move in the trend toward improving consumer information online amid growing public and political pressure for transparency.

Meanwhile, it will likely be part of another trend, as well--that of hospitals and physicians criticizing hospital and physician ranking sites. The magazine rated safety at 1,159 hospitals in 44 states on a 100-point scale based on publicly available data. Only 158 hospitals scored 60 or higher. The best-performing hospital, 272-bed Billings Clinic in Billings, Mont., scored 72 points.

The middling results echo those of a Leapfrog Group hospital scorecard released last month. Even hospitals with good reputations didn't fare well in that report, which gave hospitals letter grades. Baldridge Award winner Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and the Cleveland Clinic's main campus (and most of its hospitals) scored Cs, for example, as FierceHealthcare reported...