Another approach to finding the right hospital is to find the nearest brand-name institution. If you're in Minnesota or north Florida, that means the Mayo Clinic.  The mid-Atlantic area: Johns Hopkins Hospital. And so on around the country.  I wish it was that easy.  Big prestigious hospitals like M.D. Anderson in Houston or Johns Hopkins in Baltimore are not necessarily an easy shortcut to top quality care.  None of these hospitals is perfect; no institution of human beings can be.  I've sued Hopkins on behalf of injured patients several times.  In one, the care by a pediatric cardiologist was so bad, and so clearly caused the death of my clients' adorable 3-year-old, that the hospital ran up the white flag shortly after we filed suit, and we reached a confidential settlement. You would make a mistake going to Hopkins without checking out the specific department and the specific doctor whose specialty covers what you need.  The same applies wherever you live.  The nearest mega-hospital connected to a medical school may or may not be right for you. Still, it's the place where I would start in looking for treatment for any serious disease, whether or not you may need surgery, because the mega-teaching hospital is most likely to have these critical ingredients for avoiding medical catastrophe and getting the best care:

·         Sub-specialists in your disease and your kind of treatment.

·         A research focus that helps assure up-to-date treatment.

·         Teams organized around these sub-specialists to deliver the most coordinated care.

·         An institutional focus on preventing errors or catching them before they do harm.

But if you don't have an exotic condition and instead are laboring with garden variety heart failure or diabetes or any of the other common ailments that fill hospitals, you may be better off with a good community hospital. How do we find the best?

Read on to the next article...

(This is another short excerpt from my book.)

Medicare has started requiring hospitals to have patients fill out a standardized survey when they leave the hospital, and the questions focus on a lot of issues that people care about and have a big impact on the quality and safety of their care, such as:

·         Did the doctors and nurses always communicate well?

·         Was the bathroom always clean?

·         Was your pain always well-controlled?

·         Was the area around your room always quiet at night?

Note that little word "always."  These are things patients have a right to expect - always.

To see how this works out in one real-life example, let's go to New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University.  No, we're not going to Yale-New Haven Hospital, one of the nation's most prestigious medical institutions.  Instead we'll drive due west ten miles to the Naugatuck River Valley town of Derby, where we find a hospital named Griffin.

Griffin Hospital gets great patient satisfaction ratings.  Fortune magazine rated it one of the 100 best places to work in America.  And when you see a little of the hospital, you know why.  Here's how Jim Conway, a top official with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, one of the leaders in the field, enthuses about Griffin:

"Driving by, you wouldn't even notice it, very nondescript," says Conway.  "But when you walk in the door you know you're in an extraordinarily different place.  You'll see musicians playing in the lobby, a fireplace in the cafeteria, just a warm, welcoming environment.  You go up to the unit, and you can not only look in your own chart whenever you want, you can write questions in the chart that you want the doctor or nurse to answer. It's also set up so families can choose whatever level of involvement they're comfortable with."

You can find the results of the patient surveys on Medicare's Hospital Compare website by clicking here. You will find that many community hospitals do a better job than the mega-hospitals of taking care of patients in the ways that patients notice.