It is hard to believe but it has been about one year since the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released its initial hospital rating system. At that time 102 hospitals earned the coveted five-star rating. The most recent ratings show 188 hospitals with the five-star rating out of roughly 3,500 hospitals. The rating system is still evolving and has received criticism across a number of fronts as penalizing urban hospitals.
We ran the numbers to see what the profile of the 188 five-star hospitals are. Using the Hospital Consumer Assessment (HCAHPS) Interactive blended with general survey data from the AHA Annual Survey Database™, we were able to get a picture of what the five-star hospitals look like and where they are located. We constructed a ratio of five-star hospitals over all hospitals for various classifications.
Five-Star Hospitals are Small
Of the 188 five-star hospitals, 144 of them are in hospitals with less than 50 beds. On the contrary, not a single hospital with more than 300 beds had a five-star rating. The following pie graph shows this discrepancy very starkly.
Five-Star Hospitals are Capitalistic
The 188 hospitals includes 26 that are owned by physicians which is 58% of all physician owned hospitals as noted in the table below. The list includes 38 hospitals that are private partnerships or 24% of all hospital partnerships. The worse five-star ratios? Non-profits which have less than 4% that are five-star hospitals.
