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Five Salt Lake County hospitals received four out of five stars from the federal government in its recent quality ratings.
The ratings, released Wednesday by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), use 64 different measures to determine the quality of more than 4,000 hospitals across the U.S. These measures include patient experience, safety of care and effectiveness of care.
University of Utah Health Care and LDS Hospital were among the list of five area hospitals to receive four stars. This rating partly is because both were above the national average in readmission rates and patient experience, according to the data.
Bob Pendleton, the U.'s chief medical quality officer, said officials are pleased with the four star rating, but noted that the rating system isn't perfect.
"Although it has its challenges, I think, directionally, a movement toward figuring out how to make cost of care, quality of care and safety of care transparent to consumers is a valuable path to go down," Pendleton said. "We're just at the beginning of that."
No hospital in the state received five stars, the highest rating a hospital can receive. Nationally, only about 2 percent of hospitals received five stars.
The ratings are available to search on medicare.gov's Hospital Compare page.
In a blog post Wednesday, Kate Goodrich, director of CMS's Center for Clinical Standards and Quality, said the updated ratings will "help millions of patients and their families learn about the quality of hospitals, compare facilities in their area side-by-side and ask important questions about care quality when visiting a hospital or other health care provider."
But not all interested parties think the quality ratings are a good thing.
Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, said in a statement today the ratings are "confusing for patients and families trying to choose the best hospital to meet their health care needs."
He added that he was disappointed the ratings were released because they "clearly are not ready for prime time."
The Utah Hospital Association, too, is concerned. Jill Vicory, association spokeswoman, said there are "significant" problems with the methodology, such as hospitals not being judged on the same measures.
"While we support the effort to make provider ratings more simple and transparent for the consumer, we hope that CMS will continue to refine the rating methodology so that it can truly be more representative of a hospital's performance," Vicory added.
The feds initially planned to release the ratings in April, but pushed back the release date after hundreds of lawmakers wrote letters asking them to wait until they were improved.
Goodrich's post today notes that CMS has worked extensively with hospitals "to understand their concerns and directly answer their questions" during the delay.
Also in Salt Lake County, Intermountain Medical Center received three out of five stars in the federal government's ratings. Although it ranked better than the national average for readmission rates and patient experience, it was dinged for being below the national average for safety of care.
Jess Gomez, Intermountain spokesman, said officials "don't believe it accurately reflects the level of acuity of the patients we treat and the severity of their illnesses and injuries."
"We're analyzing the data from CMS, some of which was collected in 2013, and examining the process used to capture and report the data, to make sure our process accurately reflects the high acuity of our patient population," Gomez said. "If the data were affected because we under-reported the acuity level of our patients, our scores will not be accurate."
Salt Lake Regional Medical Center was given a two star rating, the lowest in the county. It was ranked below the national average for both patient experience and safety of care.
One other Utah hospital received two stars: Davis Hospital and Medical Center. Across the state, 14 hospitals were given four stars and 12 were given three stars. No Utah hospital was given lower than two stars.
Twitter: @alexdstuckey