New Report Ranks America’s Best Hospitals

A new  report  ranks America’s 405 best hospitals based on their quality of treatment for heart attacks, pneumonia, and other critical ailments. Some of the nation’s leading health care providers are not on the list. Dr. Mark Chassin, president of the Joint Commission, the hospital certification organization that conducted the study, said, “We recognize that improvement has been happening across the country on these measures, but there are some hospitals that have achieved extraordinary levels of performance.” Dr. Peter Pronovost, a professor at Johns Hopkins Univeristy School of Medicine and director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety, talks about how patients can decide what hospital will best meet their needs.  Pronovost is the author of checklists for hospitals, made famous in Atul Gawande’s book “The Checklist Manifesto.”