fah hospital policy blog

The Federation of American Hospitals this week commented on the CMS proposed methodology changes for the Medicare Hospital Star Rating program.

“It is vitally important to hospitals, patients, their families, and the overall national work on quality improvement and public reporting that any changes to the display data by star categories accurately reflect the quality of care provided by hospitals to their patients,” FAH wrote in the letter.

FAH has indicated to CMS several times that the Star Ratings were “not ready for primetime” because they didn’t accurately reflect – in an easily discernable way – the true quality of care being provided by the facilities.

“FAH strongly suggests that CMS further test its methodologies and hold focus groups with hospitals, physicians, patients, families and caregivers to understand how well the statistical information and displays are understood and determined to be useful by all stakeholders.”

In the letter, which can be found here, FAH proposes several improvements to the Star Ratings methodology and asks CMS to suspend release of the ratings until changes are made.