By Kathleen O’Brien | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
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on April 21, 2015 at 7:38 AM, updated April 21, 2015 at 1:22 PM
The federal government recently debuted an online tool that lets consumers compare the patient experience at hospitals around the country through its “star” ratings.
A quick stroll through the spreadsheet shows that New Jersey has not a single five-star hospital. It has four four-star hospitals (Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, Deborah Heart & Lung Center in Browns Mills, Virtua West Jersey Hospitals, Berlin, and Inspira Medical Center in Elmer), while the other 58 facilities get just one, two or three stars.
By contrast, the good people of Iowa are blessed with 11 five-star hospitals.
And the world-renowned Mayo Clinic gets only four stars.
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services unveiled its star system for rating hospital patient experience, based on patients’ ratings of a hospital’s cleanliness, communication from staff, and attentiveness to patients, and whether it was sufficiently quiet at night.
Those attributes, while admirable, are not necessarily the same as what goes into to providing top-notch care, said David Knowlton of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute.