Maine Med is again 'best hospital' in the state, but what do the US News rankings mean?
Courtesy / MaineHealth
Maine Medical Center, in Portland, ranked as the best hospital in the state for the eighth consecutive year, according to U.S. News & World Report.
In a year unlike any other for hospitals, Maine Medical Center ranks as the best in the state, according to U.S. News & World Report, for the eighth year in a row.
The magazine last week released its highly anticipated — but sometimes controversial — annual evaluations of hospitals across the country. This year, the analysis compared 4,554 U.S. facilities, or nearly all public inpatient hospitals, including 40 in Maine.
In addition to being named a best regional hospital, Maine Med, the 637-bed flagship institution of the MaineHealth system, earned “high-performing” grades in the specialty of urology and in all 10 of the specific procedures and conditions analyzed by U.S. News. While over 1,400 hospitals throughout the country were high-performing in a procedure or condition, Maine Med was one of only 37 that received the rating across the board.
Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center, with 411 licensed beds in Bangor, ranks No. 2 statewide, and received high-performing grades in three procedures or conditions. EMMC tied for No. 2 last year with another facility in the Northern Light system, Mercy Hospital of Portland.
Mercy was not ranked by U.S. News this year, but received two high-performing grades for procedures or conditions. MaineGeneral Medical Center, of Augusta, also received two. Three Maine hospitals each received a single high-performing grade: St. Joseph Hospital, in Bangor, St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center, in Lewiston, and Southern Maine Health Care-Biddeford Medical Center.
The U.S. News rankings are based on a variety of quantitative and qualitative data about each hospital’s performance, including patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes. A high-performing grade for a procedure or condition means that a hospital rated “significantly better” than the average of its peers in that clinical area. Hospitals with a high-performing grade for a medical specialty rank among the top 10% in the country for that field.
The newest results for Maine hospitals show some small declines from last year’s performance.
In 2019, Maine Med was high-performing in three specialties, as well as all nine of the procedures and conditions that were studied that year. The hospital also ranked No. 34 nationally in the specialty of gynecology.
EMMC earned four high-performing grades in 2019, compared to three this year. And Mercy does not share the No. 2 ranking with EMMC in the current ranking.
Rankings for the new normal?
None of the 16 medical specialties or 10 procedures and conditions in the U.S. News analysis pertain specifically to COVID-19. For example, infectious disease medicine is not among clinical areas on which hospitals were graded.
Because the new rankings are based on information that predates the pandemic, they don’t reflect how well each hospital is responding to it, U.S. News said in its rankings report. The magazine noted that changes in its analysis will likely be needed next year to reflect COVID-19’s impact.
There are other limitations to the U.S. News rankings, which have been compiled since 1990 and which hospitals use widely to market themselves.
Over the years, some critics have claimed the rankings rely too heavily on the reputations of nationally prominent hospitals.
A 1997 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that “a small group of prominent hospitals in each specialty receives such high scores that they automatically rise to the top of the rankings, regardless of structure or outcome score. ‘America's Best Hospitals’ identifies America's best regarded hospitals, but provides limited additional insight into quality.”
Another study, reported in 2010 by the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that “the relative standings of the top 50 hospitals [in the U.S. News rankings] largely reflect the subjective reputations of those hospitals. Moreover, little relationship exists between subjective reputation and objective measures of hospital quality among the top 50 hospitals.”
In response, newer studies and rankings have sprouted in recent years to provide objective comparisons among the country’s health care providers.
For example, in 2000 the nonprofit Leapfrog Group began grading U.S. hospitals annually on their record of patient safety. The group’s 2020 rankings were released in April, and included results for 17 Maine hospitals.
In March, for the second year, Newsweek magazine published its own ranking of the top hospitals in the U.S. In that analysis, Newsweek ranked two Maine hospitals: Maine Med, at No. 117, and Mercy, at No. 215.
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