A comparison of big and small hospitalsEven though most of the patients prefer being in a quiet room rather than a noisy one and being attended to by an attentive nurse instead of a flighty one, such small aspects of health care are rarely concerned compared to the overall treatment quality availed. A new study has found out that this aspect of health care is mostly found in bigger hospitals and it is something offered seldom by smaller hospitals.

Patient satisfaction in hospitals

The study was published in the Risk Management and Insurance Review and aimed at ascertaining aspects that makes a hospital much better compared to another one. They utilized a methodology referred to as PRIDIT, which is a tool used commonly in detection of health care fraud. During the study, researchers compiled data sets of multiple years on hospitals U.S and analyzed various quality variables as well as outcomes in their efforts of finding out the types of facilities that yield the best rating in overall. Even though big hospitals scored much worse when it comes to patient satisfaction, they nevertheless had a high ability of delivering high quality surgery and treatment alternatives that outshined the comforts availed by the smaller hospitals.

The lead author of the study, Robert D. Lieberthal said that patients suffering from chronic conditions such as heart failure are highly advised to seek treatment in large hospitals as they are well experienced in handling a large number of patients suffering from heart failure. In the past, Lieberthal has worked extensively with PRIDIT and the current study aimed at examining the intrinsic advantages of hospitals offering much better care as well as ways in which the reimbursement rates of hospitals are determined depending on the care.

In today’s medical landscape, this method comes with a variety of advantages. This is because programs such as Patient Protection Affordable Care Act or Obamacare and Medicare slide extensively into the foreground and insurance companies should evaluate the best compensation terms. Over the past few years, the erratic measures on quality of hospitals could cause these rates to become more volatile despite complex, large hospitals remaining unchanged relatively year to year.

Choosing the best hospital to visit

As many Americans gaining access to various health insurance programs, consumers are also required to decide the best health care facilities available to them. So much information exists that patients can use for selecting a hospital. However, these indicators are just laundry and might not mean much to the average man who might even not beware of their existence. The method used by the researchers compares hospitals directly and patients can thus be able to select between two and three hospitals easily. They just need to compare them and choose the one offering the highest quality health care.