High Quality + Fair Price=Excellent Value for Maine Hospitals
When you can get the highest quality services at a fair price, that translates to excellent value. That’s exactly what Mainers get from hospitals here: excellent value.
Maine continues to provide higher quality hospital care on average than any other state in the country, according to data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare website (https://www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html). Hospital Compare provides a large, stable data set with individual hospital performance as well as state and national averages calculated by CMS. All publicly reported and comparable measures with sufficient quantifiable data were included in the calculation. The hospital-reported data is subject to CMS validation.
Maine hospitals have long delivered outstanding care. In 2003, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, using similar data, ranked the quality of care provided by Maine’s hospitals as 3rd best in the country since 1998. Since that time, Maine hospitals have consistently ranked well for the quality of care they provide, reaching number 1 several times.
In May 2019, the Leapfrog Group released its Hospital Safety Scores. Maine hospitals had the third highest percentage of A's in the country, with half of Maine hospitals earning A's. In another 2018 Leapfrog report, of the 17 hospitals named to Leapfrog’s Top Rural Hospitals list, seven were in Maine. Only nine states had hospitals on the Top Rural list. Maine was the only state with more than two hospitals listed.
In the most recent year, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality listed Maine as the best in the country in its National Healthcare Quality and Disparity Report across all settings of healthcare.
Although they are already leaders in providing high-quality healthcare, Maine’s hospitals still strive to improve. As the science of medicine evolves, so does the science of healthcare quality. The field is advancing rapidly and hospitals routinely re-evaluate how they structure, measure and monitor quality management and use that information to improve care.
But high-quality care is only half of the equation when it comes to evaluating value. Medicare spends less in Maine for each episode of hospital care than the national average. Medicare spending in Maine for each episode of hospital care is the second lowest in New England.
Average Medicare Spending Per Episode by State 2016
(Source: Hospital Compare)
When you consider Maine hospitals’ high quality (best in the nation) and fair cost you can see what an excellent value Maine hospitals provide.