But some hospital officials are skeptical. The site bills itself as the Internet's first objective hospital grading system. The service rates hospitals engaged in cardiology and cardiac surgery on a scale of one to five. The company purchased Medicare mortality data, the raw data for the analysis, from the Health Care Financing Administration, then adjusted the data to account for the fact that some hospitals care for a larger number of seriously ill patients than others. Rick Wade, a spokesperson for the American Hospital Association, says that several member hospitals have questioned the validity of the site's data.
People die in the hospital for a variety of reasons.
Mortality data is helpful for consumers and others to consider, as long as they have other sources of information, he said.