No Nevada hospitals in ranking for strong performance
None of the 60 hospitals in Nevada met the standards for strong performance needed to make the U.S. News & World Report lists of Best Hospitals rankings for 2015-16.
Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno, which was recognized last year for exceeding key quality measures by the leading U.S. health accreditor, received the only "high performing" mark from U.S. News, and that was for knee replacement surgery. But to make the U.S. News lists, hospitals must show exceptional performance in numerous categories.
In the other categories U.S. News analyzed — chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart bypass surgery, heart failure and hip replacements — Renown, like most of the other Nevada hospitals, was found to be average.
The U.S. News analysis is not as useful in making comparisons between facilities as the Hospital Compare from Medicare. The federal agency publishes more than 100 quality measures about hospitals on its website, and many of those are hard to decipher and put into context.
Massachusetts General Hospital, the 947-bed facility in Boston, and the Mayo Clinic, the 1,132-bed hospital in Rochester, Minn., ranked first and second in the U.S. News honor roll, which highlights hospitals that are exceptional in numerous specialties. Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore tied for third on that list with the UCLA Medical Center, which revealed last week that hackers had accessed data for as many as 4.5 million individuals in its network. The 1,268-bed Cleveland Clinic, which is affiliated with the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, was fifth on the U.S. News honor roll and first in cardiology and heart surgery, and urology.
In Southern Nevada, most of the acute care hospitals were rated average in the five common procedures studied.
Desert Springs Hospital, a 346-bed Las Vegas facility operated by Universal Health Services, was rated below average in all the categories except treating heart failure. The hospital was rated well for survival 30 days after admission after coronary artery bypass graft surgery, but struggled with re-admissions for any reason within 30 days, the U.S. News analysis revealed.
The U.S. News rankings offer another tool to help people decide on where to seek care in any stage of life. In addition to Hospital Compare, hospital ratings data are available from the Leapfrog Group, Consumer Reports and The Joint Commission, the agency that named Renown one of its 1,224 top performing hospitals in November.
Contact Steven Moore at smoore@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4563.
