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

A new study finds that, contrary to conventional wisdom, themarks a patient gives a hospital likely correspond to the actualquality of the hospital.

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

When the researchers looked at the star ratings of 3,000hospitals, they found that ones that received good grades frompatients were more likely to perform well according to conventionalquality metrics, such as the percentage of patients who died orwere readmitted to the hospitalwithin 30 days of an operation.

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

Similarly, five-star hospitals readmitted less than a fifth oftheir patients within a month of discharge, while hospitals withlower ratings all saw at least a fifth of their patients again inthat timeframe.

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

Dr. Joshua J. Fenton of the University of California, Davis,pointed out that the hospitals with the highest ratings also shareda number of characteristics that weren’t necessarily linked to thequality 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 suggestthat (patients) should use the star rating as a single guide tochoose an institution,” he said.

Granted, the reliability of readmission rates as performancemeasures has been the subject of skepticism as well. Indeed, aseparate study from Harvard last year suggested that hospitals withhigher than average readmission rates often servelower-income populations that are more likely to suffer fromchronic conditions and less likely to manage their illness asprescribed because of poor access to necessary services, includinga primary care physician or a pharmacy.