Find out how to pick the best hospital.
Most people end up in a hospital in an emergency and don’t have the luxury of choosing the hospital they will go to. If you need something non-urgent, you may have time to shop around. Find out how to pick the best hospital.
Local Options Vs. Destination Hospitals
The first option is to look at your local hospitals. Read reviews online, and check with people you know. The main driver may be expertise in what you need to have done. Some things can easily be handled by smaller regional hospitals. Other more complex issues may be better handled at a larger hospital. Teaching hospitals affiliated with a university or one of the larger destination hospitals in the US may be a better option. Look for large, accredited, or affiliated programs in that specialty. Depending on the medical issue, finding an expert that teaches other doctors may result in better care.
Hospital Reviews
Besides finding the care team you want to entrust your health with, look at reviews online for the hospital’s quality of service in general. Are people complaining about cleanliness or poor quality food? Is the nursing staff stretched so thin they can’t attend to patients?
Also, look for reviews or complaints about the hospital’s billing department. Did lots of people get overcharged, or have erroneous items on their bills? Was the billing department difficult or impossible to deal with? Has the hospital been sued or reprimanded by the state or a federal agency over consumer complaints?
Consider the estimated cost. Sometimes a regional or local hospital is significantly more expensive than the larger state-of-the-art hospitals. Pricing is all over the map and some of this is based on ownership, or hospital administrators willing to charge more for what they consider to be a captive audience.
Google’s hospital reviews, the same review system that lets people review the local taco shop and dog groomer can be a wild ride of people’s sometimes tragic healthcare experiences. In between those you can find details about the quality of care, and minutia about services that you may not find elsewhere. Knowing that the food is awful, they lack special dietary options, or the ancient room TVs have one wonky channel may bit important factors in your decision if you are going to be there for a while.
Safety Ratings
A hospital’s safety rating and infractions found by various agencies can give some useful information about the quality of care. Hospitals do a significant amount of marketing to give the public impression of professionalism and top-notch care. The reality is found in places like the Hospital Safety Grade website where you can review the safety record of various hospitals.
One way to find out of the hospital or health system in question has been prosecuted by the federal government is to search the DOJ website for the hospital name. One health system we checked had a number of federal prosecutions. You can also do online searches using the name of the facility and keywords like indictment, settlement, charged, prosecutors etc. to look for cases against a facility.