Survey ranks care at Mass. hospitals

New England Baptist tops list, according to patient responses

What makes for a good stay at the hospital? A communicative doctor or nurse.

A bad one: noisy nighttimes.

A new federal survey of patient satisfaction gave the highest ratings in Massachusetts to New England Baptist, Brigham and Women's, Newton-Wellesley, and Emerson hospitals, where more than 80 percent of those surveyed said they would recommend the hospital to someone else.

Beth Israel Deaconess-Needham, among others, was marked down for leaving patients for too long when they needed help in the bathroom.

The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services posted results yesterday from patient-satisfaction surveys conducted by more than 2,700 hospitals around the country.

"In the old days, [neighbors] talked about it over the fence," said Karen Nelson of the Massachusetts Hospital Association. "This is a more contemporary way to ask what it was like in the hospital last week. It's a way to quantify these things to make them more helpful to patients, and to hospitals so they can make improvements."

Tufts Medical Center, which landed above the state and national averages, but below some of its competitors on overall satisfaction measures, has set up teams to address how it can do better by its patients, said Dr. David Fairchild, chief medical officer.

"We're all for transparency," he said. "Internally this is a motivating factor."

Dr. Walter Ettinger - the president of UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, also in the middle of the pack - said the information will drive change inside his hospital's walls.

"We are not trying to compete with other hospitals," Ettinger said. "We are trying to use this as an internal tool to improve the patient experience."

Beth Israel Deaconess-Needham fell well below the state average for patient satisfaction, a legacy of 15 years of financial losses before the 41-bed hospital merged with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 2002, according to its administration.

"Only in the last three years or so have we been able to upgrade," Jeff Liebman, hospital president, said. "We're redoing a very old physical plant and integrating services" with the hospital's Boston parent.

Some well-known hospitals are missing from the survey. Massachusetts General Hospital, for instance, did not submit its data due to technical differences in how it was gathered, but has posted results on the hospital website, massgeneral.org. On patient surveys, 76 percent said they would rate the hospital as a 9 or 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. That nestled Mass. General between two of its largest competitors, Brigham and Women's and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

And the survey did detect some problems with Massachusetts hospitals. Across the board, patients told hospitals to keep the noise down. While 54 percent of patients across the nation said the area around their rooms was kept quiet at night, just 45 percent of UMass patients agreed.

The best hospitals in the region got credit for the way their doctors and nurses communicated with patients and one another. At Brigham and Women's, for instance, 79 percent of patients complimented the way their nurses communicated with them.

Patients, who were surveyed in the days or weeks after their discharge, also rated how well their pain was controlled, the cleanliness of bathrooms (most local hospitals did well on this one), and the quality of their discharge instructions.

The ratings are the latest in a wave of public reporting that states, hospitals, and trade groups have rolled out in recent years.

The Medicare site began posting 10 quality measures in 2005. It now lists 24 measures of how hospitals care for patients with heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia and how they prevent surgical infections. Deaths from heart attacks and heart failure are also tabulated, along with how much Medicare pays for certain procedures.

Michael Leavitt, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the program that posted the survey, said at a meeting of healthcare journalists in Washington yesterday that adding the patient satisfaction data is one more step toward making reliable information easier to find.

"We hope it will have the impact of driving quality up and price down," he said.

Gideon Gil of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Washington.