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Each year, U.S. News & World Report publishes its assessment of the best hospitals by specialty. The “Heart and Heart Surgery” ranking is based on three equally weighted measures: in-hospital mortality rates, availability of technologies and services (i.e., nurse–bed ratio, open-heart surgery, magnetic resonance imaging), and reputation among surveyed cardiologists. In a test of the rankings’ validity, researchers used Medicare administrative data to compare mortality rates among patients treated for acute myocardial infarctions at the 50 top-ranked hospitals (14,000 patients) with rates at 3813 nonranked hospitals (255,000 patients).
After adjustment for differences in patient characteristics, the 50 ranked hospitals had a lower mean 30-day…