Quality Measurement & Star Ratings
Patients, families and communities deserve accurate, clear and meaningful quality information to help them make important health care decisions.
The AHA has long supported transparency and continues to share the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' goal of making the data on Hospital Compare easier for consumers to understand.
However, CMS’s flawed approach to star ratings undermines this goal by providing an inaccurate, misleading picture of hospital quality. That is why a majority of Congress urged CMS to delay the reporting of star ratings, and why the AHA and others have repeatedly urged CMS to suspend the reporting of overall star ratings until the methodology is improved.
As constructed, the star ratings fall short of meeting principles that the AHA has embraced for quality report cards and rating systems. We want to work with CMS and the Congress to fix the hospital star ratings so that it is helpful and useful to both patients and the hospitals that treat them.
Read on for more.