Commonwealth Health hospitals receive subpar scores in latest federal quality ratings
Aug. 2—Three area Commonwealth Health hospitals are among fewer than two dozen hospitals throughout Pennsylvania ranked in the bottom two tiers in the latest federal quality star rating reports.
Both Regional Hospital of Scranton and Moses Taylor Hospital received subpar 2-star ratings in the new rankings by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS.
Commonwealth Health's Wilkes-Barre General Hospital was tagged with a 1-star rating.
Six other hospitals across four Northeast Pennsylvania counties — Lackawanna, Luzerne, Wayne and Schuylkill — achieved overall 4-star ratings in the rankings, which are updated each July.
They were Geisinger Community Medical Center, Scranton; Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center, Plains Twp.; Wilkes-Barre VA Medical Center, Plains Twp.; Wayne Memorial Hospital, Honesdale; Lehigh Valley Hospital-Hazleton, and St. Luke's Miners Memorial Hospital, Coaldale.
No hospital in the region received a top 5-star rating.
The overall ratings, 1 to 5 stars, summarize how well each hospital performed on an identified set of quality measures such as deaths after heart attacks or pneumonia.
According to the CMS, the five quality areas include mortality, safety of care, readmissions, patient experience and timely and effective care.
Of the 126 hospitals in Pennsylvania that received overall ratings for 2023, Wilkes-Barre General was one just five hospitals that got a 1-star score.
Regional and Moses Taylor, along with Lehigh Valley Hospital-Schuylkill in Pottsville, were among 17 hospitals across the commonwealth that were given 2-star ratings.
A total of 45 hospitals, including Endless Mountain Health Systems in Montrose, received 3-star ratings, and 41 got 4 stars. Only 18 hospitals in the state earned a 5-star rating.
In an emailed statement, Commonwealth Health spokeswoman Annmarie Poslock said the system's hospitals are committed to providing safe, quality care for every patient.
"Each hospital continues to take every opportunity to further increase quality and service," she said.
As examples, she cited the hospitals' creation of "sepsis alert" systems provide appropriate care to patients with severe infection as soon as possible and the adoption of operational practices that have improved timely triage and treatment of emergency room patients — a metric measured in the CMS rating.
Poslock said the hospitals also have worked to improve the patient experience. While the CMS star report reflects information related to patients' experiences through 2021, she suggested a more current gauge is the hospitals' Google reviews, where both Wilkes-Barre General and Regional Hospital are at 4.2 and Moses Taylor is at 4.3 out of 5 stars.
"By internally monitoring our current performance, we are able to report that our hospitals are performing better on many of the key measures that are the focus of our improvement efforts," she said. "When making health care decisions, patients should use all available tools at their disposal, such as talking with friends and family and consulting with doctors, nurses and other trusted health care providers."
Amy Minnich, associate vice president of quality, safety, and patient experience at Geisinger, said in an email the CMS program is one of several quality and safety programs it participates in, with an "aspirational goal" for each of its hospitals to achieve a 5-star rating.
"We have many teams organized at each hospital and across the system to thoughtfully and carefully work on improvements," she said.
Although the data CMS uses for its ratings can be a year or two out of date depending on the measure, Geisinger follows the rankings" to look back on performance and actions taken to see if we have gone in the right direction," she said.
"We spend most of our efforts looking at more current performance and data that will help drive patient improvements and outcomes," she said.
Overall ratings were unavailable for three regional hospitals — Lehigh Valley Hospital-Dickson City; Geisinger St. Luke's Hospital, Orwigsburg, and Barnes-Kasson County Hospital, Susquehanna — because there were too few measures or measure groups reported to calculate a score, CMS said.
The CMS said star ratings can provide information and are helpful for making comparisons, but patients should consider a variety of factors when choosing a hospital, including physician guidance and other aspects of quality such as rates of inflection and complications.
Contact the writer:
dsingleton@timesshamrock.com, 570-348-9132
