CHARLOTTE — Mission Hospitals in Asheville is among the country’s 50 best, according to ratings published in the latest issue of Business North Carolina magazine. The evaluations were done by Health Grades Inc. a Lakewood, Colo.-based hospital consultant. It uses Medicare data on complications and deaths and adjusts the results for hospitals that receive sicker patients.
Other hospitals in the state rated highly by Health Grades are Haywood Regional Medical Center in Clyde, Nash General Hospital in Rocky Mount and Rex Hospital in Raleigh. All joined Mission among the top 5% of hospitals in the nation in overall excellence. Health Grades also rates the 10 best hospitals in the state in six specialties: critical care, general surgery, heart ailments, orthopedics, stroke and vascular disorders. The complete ratings appear in the magazine’s March issue. A separate ranking by U.S. News and World Report magazine places Duke University Hospital in Durham, UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill, North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte and Mission Hospitals among the state’s best.
Business North Carolina is a Charlotte-based statewide monthly magazine that focuses on the people, events and trends that shape business in North Carolina. Since it began publication in 1981, it has won more than 80 national awards for its writing, reporting and design.
Notice that this rating cites Haywood Regional Medical Center as one of the country’s best hospitals. Huh. That rating would have to be called into question after the problems Haywood Regional has had with Medicare and government officials pulling their Medicare funding.
3 Comments
A family member of mine died via suicide on the inpatient psych unit of MSJ in 2007. A friend’s elderly confused family member was sedated while in the ER, then allowed to fall and hit his head. Luckily he is okay. It’s the best hospital in town. Oh yeah, it’s the only hospital in town.
Healthgrades is a marketing scam. The company charges hospitals tens of thousands of dollars to use their name, logo and rating to boost the hospital image. Every hospital gets ranked on some kind of list because Healthgrades wants to sell as many licenses as it can.
I used to work in hospital marketing, and we never participated in Healthgrades because it was pay-for-play (as opposed to U.S. News rankings, which are free to the public and to hospitals. They’re based on objective comparisons of a smaller set of data from Medicare. Not that U.S. News doesn’t make a bundle on special hospital advertising in its rankings issue…)
How does a ranking like that even happen, when they hospital failed several inspection IN A ROW over the last few months???
Did this group even do research? If they did, they would have seen an infection rating far too high to ignore, serious problems with over and under dosing, etc, etc.