Wow! The numbers from El Camino hospital are just 'out of the park!' What are they doing that is so different from other hospitals? Are they so great or are the other hospitals (at the top of the list, in particular) so bad!

I'm not sure if fining the hospitals is going to get the best result.

1. The hospitals will charge insured patients even more $ to offset the loss of Medicare reimbursements, or;

2. The hospitals will be less inclined to be available for Medicare patients.

Thanks for this interesting article,Sue Drennan-- a follow-up investigating the details leading to El Camino Hospital´s excellent rating would be welcome!

Stanford hospital cares for the sickest patients and also accurately reports their data. The community hospitals don't care for trauma patients, perform heroic surgery, treat patients with leukemia, or perform organ or bone marrow transplants. These types of patients skew the data. The only fair comparison would be with comparable academic medical centers.

@jet pilot,
I think you should reread the article. The things included in the data are things like infections from central line insertions and hysterectomies. A lot of that has to do with processes and procedures and nothing to do with the patient profile. I know from experience with different services that even equipment vendors can play into outcomes like this, and Stanford doesn't review those relationships. The PAMF surgical center has none of those factors you mention, either.

It's easy to make excuses, but the first thing you could do is review the historical trends. Then procedures. El Camino seems to have improved and Stanford not.

I have been in Stanford Hospital twice, for a week each time. The first was an emergency situation with a serious injury. The second was for follow-up surgery secondary to the injury of the first hospitalization.

Both times I was horrified by the patient care ( or lack of it ), as well as inadequate pain control.

During both one-week stays, I never once saw a nurse between 11:00 pm and 7:30 am. That was always when my morphine pump ran out and all the alarms went off-- and no one responded to the alarms OR the desperate, repeated pressing of the call button.

To top it off, I acquired a serious infection during the second hospitalization that required emergency intravenous antibiotics.

A few years later, I had an emergency admission to El Camino. In the week I was there, I had very attentive care AND the bill was slightly more than half the Stanford bill of five years earlier!

I often wonder, with all the huge malpractice lawsuits they have lost, how Stanford has kept its doors open.