Designated Market Areas are geographic areas defined by The Nielsen Company as a group of counties that make
up a particular television market.:
Naturally, this begs the obvious question of what in the heck does a television ratings company and their data acquisition methodology have to do with a study on hospitals?
Questions such as this raise red flags for me as to the validity and value of the study, but because I didn't easily find clear answers to my questions I thought that I'd post it at Free Republic anyway so that readers here can make up their own minds as to whether this study has any worth or not.
One of the factors that made me want to get this study to a wider readership is that the NHS hospitals in the UK have been ranked in similar ways for decades, and although I am of course completely opposed to Socialized medicine and ZeroCare I had always been intrigued by these UK hospital rankings and have wished for similar rankings to be available here in the USA. This study and its associated rankings are touted as the first of its kind and so I felt it's quite noteworthy for that reason alone. How accurate the data is of course is an entirely different matter ;-)
There are a lot of really good hospitals that didn’t make the list. I will tell you up front that I don’t know the majority of these hospitals and I haven’t read the methodology. But I would bet that the majority of these a smaller community hospitals that either do not take patients who are seriously ill or the seriously ill patients go to the bigger inner-city hospitals and teaching facilities. The other think I want to mention is that, for me, the key to quality care should be reflected in the hospital’s nosocomial infection rates. Nosocomial infections are those acquired AFTER the patient enters the hospital. Just my opinion.
Oh great! The best on closest to us is Mercy Hospital in Scranton, PA which we hear is being sold because of the excessive costs necessitated by Obamacare.