“Everyone should have ready access to all necessary medical, hospital and related services.” — President Harry Truman
By Jack Bernard, contributing columnist
PEACHTREE CITY, Ga. | With the exception of “medical deserts” in lower income urban and rural areas, most Georgians have “ready access” to a hospital… if they can afford it. But an unacceptable 13 percent of Georgians are uninsured…and in some rural counties (Whitfield, Atkinson, Webster, Candler and Gordon) over one in five are uninsured. (That is a discussion for another time.)
What about those Georgians that do have financial access to a local hospital? It is very difficult to know your area’s hospital quality rating versus others. But without this data, how do you know if you should go there…or drive further away to a better rated hospital? Your health and life could depend on which direction you head.
Thankfully, there is one generally recognized national source for this information – US News and World Report. This publication evaluates data regarding ten procedures and conditions, breaking down hospitals into three categories- “high performing,” “as expected” and “evaluated.”
Obviously, you would want to take your sick, elderly mother to a facility in the “high performing” category, even if it is inconvenient and means using more gas.
As would be expected, most of Georgia’s ‘high performing” 15 regional hospitals are in the greater Atlanta metro area.
In order of quality rating rankings, they include: Emory University Hospital, Emory St. Joseph’s Hospital, Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, Emory University Hospital Midtown, WellStar Kennestone Hospital, Northside Hospital Cherokee, Piedmont Fayette Hospital, Northside Hospital Forsyth, Northside Hospital Atlanta, and Northside Hospital Gwinnett.
Facilities outside of the metro area which are also rated “high performing” include (in order of ranking): Northeast Georgia Medical Center (Gainesville), Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center, AdventHealth Redmond (Rome), Atrium Health Navicent Medical Center (Macon), and Piedmont Augusta Hospital.
In addition, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is rated as the best children’s hospital in the Southeast, top performing in 10 of the 11 pediatric specialties evaluated.
Notably, some of our more populated areas…such as Columbus and Savannah… do not have any hospitals included on this list of top Georgia facilities. Here is a list of the largest Georgia general acute care (versus specialty) hospitals which did not make this list of top performing facilities- Grady (953 beds) in Atlanta; the Augusta University Medical Center (728 beds); Phoebe Putney (621 beds) in Albany; Piedmont Columbus (583 beds); Memorial Health University Medical Center (594 beds) in Savannah; Piedmont Henry Hospital (383 beds); Wellstar Cobb (367 beds) in Austell; Saint Francis-Emory (325 beds) in Columbus; Doctors Hospital of Augusta (319 beds); Archbold Medical Center (301 beds) in Thomasville; Piedmont Eastside (299 beds) in Snellville; and Atrium Health Floyd (299 beds) in Rome. Individual ratings can be accessed via this website- https://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/best-regional-hospitals .
Most Americans are not even aware that this privately developed report exists. One would think that our federal and state governments would want the public to have this type of information so that patients could make informed decisions about their healthcare. But evidently, that must not be the case. At least the two political parties can agree on something- not upsetting the usual power structure, including hospital administrators, by releasing objective information regarding hospital performance.
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