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Patients Rate Area Hospitals

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Medicare.gov has released rankings of area hospitals based upon surveys of patients.

The surveys include eleven different measures, from noise levels and clean rooms to how well their doctor communicated about medication and care after they left the hospital.

Strong Hospital received the highest overall ranking in the region, at "four stars."

Chief Operating Officer Kathy Parrinello says the five star rating is a high bar to achieve, but these kind of patient surveys serve a useful purpose.

"I think having a rating system is helpful in that it gets us focused on what our patients are thinking about, often the care they received," Parrinello says.

Chief Medical Officer for Rochester Regional Health Systems, Dr. Robert Mayo, says they work regularly to review feedback from patients and their families, and use feedback from the surveys to improve their processes to ensure they are delivering the care that patients and their families need and expect.

He says they take the survey results very seriously.

But people should not use patient survey results as the sole tool in making a decision about which hospital they should go to, according to Dr. Thomas Mahoney, Chief Medical Officer at Finger Lakes Health Systems Agency. 

He says your physician understands what your needs may be, and that can't be done by a general rating system like this.

Here's a link to the survey:

http://www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html