UNC REX and Duke Health are the only five-star hospitals in the Triangle, ratings say
Corrected on Feb. 21 2020. An earlier version of this story misstated that Duke Regional Hospital was in Raleigh, not Durham.
There are just 13 hospitals with five-star overall care in North Carolina and three of them — UNC Rex Hospital, Duke Raleigh Hospital and Duke Regional Hospital in Durham — are in the Triangle.
That’s according to ratings from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), a part of the Department of Health and Human Services, which grades hospitals nationwide with a star rating system.
Rated on the CMS Hospital Compare website, the hospitals are examined on seven areas of hospital quality: mortality, safety of care, readmission, patient experience, effectiveness of care, timeliness of care and efficient use of medical imaging.
A star rating is determined by an average of these group scores based on data reported to CMS by hospitals. To qualify for a rating, hospitals must have available measures for at least three of these groups.
The three five-star hospitals all got scores higher than or the same as the national and state average in various patient surveys, including that doctors and nurses “always” communicated well and that they “would definitely recommend the hospital.”
“UNC Health Care is proud of the excellent care we provide to all our patients, every day,” said Alan Wolf, a spokesman for the hospital system, in a press release. “Every one of our affiliated hospitals constantly strives to improve that care, and share best practices across our system. We look at new ways to reduce readmissions, for example, and enhance patient satisfaction.”
UNC Health Care, the system over UNC REX, announced Thursday that it has changed its name to UNC Health.
Measures included in the rating included the percentage of mothers whose deliveries were scheduled one to two weeks early, when not medically necessary — UNC REX and Duke Regional had 0%, lower than the national average of 2%.
The hospitals also ranked better or no different than the national rates for problems like surgical complications, infections and 30-day death rate.
It’s the second year in a row that Duke Regional in Durham has been awarded five stars.
“Receiving a five-star rating, the highest possible from CMS, recognizes our teams’ dedication to excellence in all that we do,” said David Zaas, president of Duke Raleigh Hospital, in a statement. “I am proud of our teams’ dedication to delivering an unparalleled patient experience for members of our community during what is often the toughest time patients and their families must go through.”
Only 407, or about 9% of rated hospitals nationwide have five stars. Forty-nine percent have three or four stars, such as the WakeMed hospitals in Raleigh and Cary, which received three stars.
In a statement to The News & Observer, Chris DeRienzo, chief quality & medical staff officer for WakeMed, said the hospitals are committed to improvement.
“WakeMed uses external benchmarks like CMS Star Ratings and Watson’s Top 50 Cardiovascular Hospitals to help us retrospectively compare ourselves to others around the country,” DeRienzo said. “While no ratings system is perfect or complete, the CMS Star Ratings do allow us to nationally benchmark some measures on performance from 2015. Looking forward, we are most focused on providing safe, high-quality care to each and every patient we serve today and supporting improvement teams across the system to help us become even better tomorrow.”
This story was originally published February 21, 2020 at 9:45 AM.
