PORT ANGELES — Two North Olympic Peninsula hospitals are looking upward happily from the bottom of the barrel.
Jefferson Healthcare hospital ranks in the second percentile of a nationwide study of how aggressively hospitals treat chronically ill Medicare patients.
Olympic Medical Center is a notch higher at the third percentile on a scale of one to 100, least to most aggressive.
Forks Community Hospital was not included in the study.
The rankings were published last week by Consumer Reports Health based on data from Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire.
While aggressiveness might sound desirable, medical experts say that’s not necessarily so.
Aggressive care brings outcomes no better than “core measures,” or best practices, as measured by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the OMC chief of medical staff said.
Aggressive means more specialists, more tests, more surgeries — and the possibility of more errors, misdiagnoses, infections and incompatible prescriptions, Dr. Mark Fischer said.
