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On Sept. 27, CHA submitted the attached comments on the Enhancements of the Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings report, which proposed improvements to the overall star rating methodology.
In the letter, CHA urges CMS to remove the hospital star ratings until all comments are responded to and errors are addressed. CHA also shares concerns about CMS using the contractor who developed and implemented the five star methodology to also conduct the evaluation of it.
CHA strongly supports alternative approaches to an overall five star rating, as well as the proposal to remove hospitals that do not meet the public reporting thresholds for measures from its k-means clustering analysis, which adversely affects the star ratings categories.
CHA also supports CMS’ proposal to run the k-means clustering analysis to convergence, ensuring that each observation within a cluster is more similar to the other observations within that cluster than to observations in the other clusters.
CHA is pleased that CMS has announced it is postponing the October 2017 update of its Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings as it continues to examine potential changes to the methodology based on public feedback. While data from the October Star Ratings Preview Reports will not be published on Hospital Compare, Star Ratings released in December 2016 will remain on the site until the next update.
