Hospital Ratings May Not Be True Quality Measure

From the Washington Post:

Conventional wisdom holds that one sure way to improve health-care quality is to measure it. A study being published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association comes to the unconventional conclusion that it's not necessarily so.

The study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine found
that going to a hospital that scored well on Medicare-mandated quality measures did not significantly reduce a patient's risk of dying.