HCA Houston Healthcare Pearland is the only hospital in the Houston area that Medicare dinged with a 1-star rating in 2022.
Medicare releases an annual list of star ratings for hospitals nationwide. It’s a results and data-focused program that reminds me of the saying “if it isn’t measured, it isn’t done.”
How does Medicare rank hospitals?
The Medicare program ranks hospitals based on their performance in five areas. The bottom-performing hospitals nationwide, based on these measures, are given 1-star ratings.
• Mortality. This measure includes the death rates for patients with heart attack, coronary artery bypass graft surgery, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart failure, pneumonia, stroke, and serious treatable complications after surgery.
• Safety of care. This measure looks at rates of central line-associated bloodstream infections, catheter-associated urinary tract infections, surgical site infections from: surgery, surgical site infections from abdominal hysterectomy, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) blood laboratory-identify events, Clostridium difficile (C. diff) blood laboratory-identify events, complication rates for hip/knee replacement patients, and other serious complications.
• Readmission. This measure looks at hospital return days for heart attack patients, rate of readmission for CABG patients, rate of readmission for COPD patients, hospital return days for heart failure patients, rate of readmission after hip/knee surgery, hospital return days for pneumonia patients, rate of readmission after discharge from hospital, rate of unplanned hospital visits after an outpatient colonoscopy, rate of unplanned hospital visits for patients receiving outpatient chemotherapy, rate of emergency department (ED) visits for patients receiving outpatient chemotherapy, and ratio of unplanned hospital visits after hospital outpatient surgery.
• Patient experience. This measure focuses on the rates of patients who reported that the nurses communicated well, their doctors communicated well, that they received help as soon as they wanted, that staff explained about medicines before giving it to them, that their room and bathroom were clean, that the area around their room was quiet at night, and that they were given information about what to do during the recovery at home. It also looked at the rate of patients who understood their care when they left the hospital and would recommend their hospital to friends and family, as well as the numerical rating patients would give on a scale of 1 to 10.
• Timely and effective care. This measure examined the percentage of healthcare workers given the influenza vaccination, patients who left the ED before being seen, patients who came to the ED with stroke symptoms who received brain scan results within 45 minutes of arrival, patients receiving appropriate recommendations for follow-up screening colonoscopy, mothers whose deliveries were scheduled too early when a scheduled delivery was not medically necessary, patients received appropriate care for severe sepsis and septic shock, outpatients with chest pain or possible heart attack who got drugs to break up blood clots within 30 minutes of arrival, patients receiving appropriate radiation therapy for cancer that has spread to the bone, outpatients with low-back pain who had an MRI without trying recommend treatments first, outpatients CT scans of the abdomen that were combination were double scans, and outpatient to the cardiac imaging stress tests before low-risk outpatient surgery. Additionally, this measure looks at the average number of minutes before patients with chest pain or possible heart attack who needed specialized care were transferred to another hospital, and the average time patients spent in the ED before leaving from the visit.
HCA Houston Healthcare Pearland
Of the 3,093 hospitals that Medicare ranked in 2022, only 192 received a 1-star ranking. In Texas, there were only three hospitals: HCA Houston Healthcare Pearland, Medical Center Hospital (Odessa), and Huntsville Memorial Hospital. That means there was only one in the Houston area.
HCA Houston Healthcare Pearland is a community hospital that’s part of the mega-hospital chain collegiate. It has 49 staffed beds and is designated as a Level IV Trauma Center.
If you’ve been seriously injured because of poor hospital or medical care at HCA Houston Healthcare Pearland, then contact a top-rated, experienced Texas medical malpractice attorney for a free strategy session about your potential case.
