The healthiest county in the state also has the best hospitals in the region. Two Chester County hospitals led the Philadelphia region with five-star ratings in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ newly released overall hospital quality ratings.
Main Line Health’s Paoli Hospital and Penn Medicine’s Chester County Hospital both earned elite status, among only 102 hospitals nationwide, reporter Jordan Rau wrote in a Philly.com report of the new ratings.
According to Medicare, the “publicly available data drives improvement, better reporting and more open access to quality information for our Medicare beneficiaries.”
But the rest of the medical community isn’t happy with the system.
“Hospitals argue the ratings will make places that treat the toughest cases look bad, but Medicare has held firm, saying that consumers need a simple way to objectively gauge quality,” the article stated.
Montogomery county hosts the region’s lowest-rated hospital, one-star Pottstown Memorial Medical Center, part of Community Health Systems.
Its “’disappointing’ rating ‘does not convey a full picture of the quality of care our hospital provides,’” a spokeswoman said in the article. “‘The use of a star system can imply substantial differences in quality among hospitals when such differences do not exist.’”
Read more about the new hospital ratings on Philly.com here, and check out previous VISTA Today coverage of hospital news here.
Correction: An earlier version of this article implied that Pottstown was in Chester County.
