U.S. News Hospital Rankings Are One Piece of the CHD Care Puzzle
Where to receive care is one of the most important decisions a family can make. Conquering CHD has a strong commitment to transparency and ensuring patients and families have essential information at their fingertips when they need it to assist them in making the best choice for their family.
With the publishing of this year’s U.S. News & World Hospital Report rankings, we remind you this is only one of many tools you can use to have a conversation with your care team and should not be used as the sole factor when making decisions about your care.
Pieces of the Puzzle from CCHD
The CHD journey, and the decisions that come along with it, can often feel like an unsolvable puzzle. Conquering CHD provides several crucial resources to help patients and families make informed decisions, each contributing its own piece to the decision-making puzzle. Two of our key tools are:
1. Hospital Navigator
Conquering CHD’s Hospital Navigator takes existing data from participating centers and presents it in an easy-to-understand format to help guide discussions with potential care centers.
2. Questions to Ask
We also urge parents to ask questions about what an individual center’s data means specifically for their diagnosis, like those found in our guide Questions to Ask Your Doctor About Congenital Heart Disease (CHD).
How do hospital rankings fit in?
It can be a challenge to understand the information in the US News & World Report Best Children’s Hospitals Ranking program and what it means for a specific case. Some people may interpret the rankings to be a true reflection of the quality of care they might receive at a given center, but in truth, the rankings only provide some of the picture. Learn more about how and why U.S. News & World Report ranks and rates hospitals.
It is hard to capture all the details of what goes into a ranking system, and we ask parents to use caution when using the rankings alone to compare two hospitals. These rankings can be misleading for patients and families with regard to a center’s outcomes and performance in certain specialties. We encourage all patients and families to use other resources and care team expertise along with this tool when making important treatment decisions.
The good news about rankings is that the important changes at U.S. News indicate our voices are being heard. They are an important step to improving how patients and families access information about hospitals close to them.
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