Listen to the patients. They may actually be pretty good judges of doctors and hospitals.

A new study finds that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the marks a patient gives a hospital likely correspond to the actual quality of the hospital.

The study, conducted by a team of Harvard researchers, looked at the star ratings that hospitals are given based on the responses patients give to a 27-question survey about their experience in the facility.

When the researchers looked at the star ratings of 3,000 hospitals, they found that ones that received good grades from patients were more likely to perform well according to conventional quality metrics, such as the percentage of patients who died or were readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of an operation.

The differences may not seem great at first, but considering how large the sample size, they are likely significant. While 9.8 percent of patients of five-star hospitals died within 30 days of being discharged, 11.2 percent of patients in one-star hospitals perished.

Similarly, five-star hospitals readmitted less than a fifth of their patients within a month of discharge, while hospitals with lower ratings all saw at least a fifth of their patients again in that timeframe.

“If you use the star rating you’re more likely to end up at a high quality hospital,” Dr. Ashish K. Jha, a study co-author, told Reuters. “But I wouldn’t use only the star rating to choose a hospital.”

Dr. Joshua J. Fenton of the University of California, Davis, pointed out that the hospitals with the highest ratings also shared a number of characteristics that weren’t necessarily linked to the quality of their service. No large hospitals received five stars; nor did any hospitals that included an intensive care unit.

“I don’t think these data are enough to by themselves to suggest that (patients) should use the star rating as a single guide to choose an institution,” he said.

Granted, the reliability of readmission rates as performance measures has been the subject of skepticism as well. Indeed, a separate study from Harvard last year suggested that hospitals with higher than average readmission rates often serve lower-income populations that are more likely to suffer from chronic conditions and less likely to manage their illness as prescribed because of poor access to necessary services, including a primary care physician or a pharmacy.

Instant Insights /

Patient ratings of hospitals might be worth more than we think

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