VA changes rating systems for facilities
February 02, 2020
The Department of Veterans Affairs will move to a new review structure for its healthcare facilities, doing away with the star rating system. This will increase transparency and allow veterans to more easily compare VA and non-VA hospitals and facilities in the same area.
According to VA officials, the star-based rating system was implemented only to compare one VA facility to another, and rank is based only on facilities within the VA system. Non-VA hospitals use other grading methods to which the star system does not convert, making the scores meaningless for this purpose.
Each VA hospital will now publish information on its wait times, quality-of-care and patient ratings on its website, alongside similar information about other local resources. These scores are provided by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, National Committee for Quality Assurance and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, among others.
Now that, under the MISSION Act, veterans have more choices in who treats them and where they receive medical care, this change is more important than ever.
The VA will continue to monitor its facilities via Strategic Analytics for Improvement and Learning (SAIL) data reports. Strategic Analytics for Improvement and Learning measures more than 60 detailed care metrics, like death rates, complications, patient satisfaction, physician ratios and more. This information is available to the public for every VA hospital.
Star ratings sometimes misrepresented the overall quality of a hospital, as they failed to give a picture of a facility’s individual strengths in care. The nuances of healthcare were lost and led to patients choosing hospitals that were not the best at providing the particular type of healthcare they needed for a certain condition, or potentially ignoring the ones that were.
In addition to being irrelevant in terms of outside hospitals and easy to misunderstand, patient feedback from focus groups indicated that star ratings also went largely ignored. Veterans said that they did not consult the ratings when making healthcare decisions.