My use of the term "outrageous" has little to do with deficiencies in U.S. News's ranking methodology, whose past versions have been criticized for relying more on subjective reputation rather than objective data on safety and quality, and having no correlation with other ratings such as those on Medicare.gov's Hospital Compare website. As Elisabeth Rosenthal has previously reported, hospital rankings are mostly about hype, and it's questionable how much impact they really have on patient choices when every academic or community hospital can probably find at least one high-ranked specialty or service line to brag about.
No, I think this top-notch ranking is outrageous because it only accounts for the patient care that the hospital and its affiliated practices provide, rather than including the health status of the surrounding community - which is awful. Although the Clinic may provide excellent care to patients who walk or are wheeled through its doors, Dan Diamond's recent article in Politico sharply contrasted the overflowing wealth of the medical institution with the barren, crumbling neighborhoods that surround it:
Yes, the hospital is the pride of Cleveland, and its leaders readily tout reports that the Clinic delivers billions of dollars in value to the state. ... But it’s also a tax-exempt organization that, like many hospitals, fought to preserve its not-for-profit status in the years leading up to the Affordable Care Act. As a result, it doesn’t have to pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes, but it is supposed to fulfill a loosely defined commitment to reinvest in its community. That community is poor, unhealthy and — in the words of one national neighborhood-ranking website — “barely livable.”
Hospitals and health systems can't be expected to shoulder the entire burden of improving a community's economic prospects, and many hospitals were originally located in poor neighborhoods because that's where more sick people live. But according to Diamond, its financial figures indicate that the Cleveland Clinic hasn't been doing nearly enough for the community to offset the tax benefits it receives:
[The Clinic's] hospital system cleared $514 million in profit last year and $2.7 billion the past four years, when accounting for investments and other sources of revenue. And since the ACA coverage expansion took full effect, the Clinic’s been able to spend a lot less to cover uninsured patients; its annual charity care costs fell by $106 million from 2013 to 2015. But its annual community benefit spending only went up $41 million across the same two-year period, raising a $65 million question: Did the Clinic just pocket the difference in savings?
“I think we have more than fulfilled our duties,” [Clinic CEO Toby] Cosgrove said in response, pointing to the system’s total community benefit spending, which was $693 million in 2015. The majority of that spending, however, wasn’t free care or direct investments in community health; about $500 million, or more than 70 percent, represented either Medicaid underpayments — the gap between the Clinic’s official rate, which is usually higher than the rate insurers pay, and what Medicaid pays — or Clinic staffers’ own medical education.
It's not that the Cleveland Clinic is blind to the health crisis occurring outside of its doors. Like all nonprofit hospitals, it is required to perform a community health needs assessment (CHNA) every three years. The 189-page document it issued in 2016 provides a dismal accounting of all of the ways in which its local neighborhoods have worse indicators of health than other counties in Ohio and the vast majority of the nation. When Diamond suggested that the Clinic consider increasing its investments in population health, "where fixing community problems like lead exposure and food deserts are viewed as equally important as treating heart attacks," CEO Cosgrove sounded doubtful about what his hospital could or should do about these problems:
"That’s a good direction to go," he allowed. “But how much can we do in population health? We don’t get paid for this, we’re not trained to do this, and people are increasingly looking to us to deal with these sorts of situations,” Cosgrove added. “I say that society as a whole has to look at these circumstances and they can’t depend on just us.”
Judging from readers' comments posted at the end of the article, Cosgrove is far from alone in thinking that it isn't the place of medical institutions to solve the problems of distressed neighborhoods. Physicians and health executives have long believed that the responsibility of medicine is solely to provide health care, not social services or economic benefits outside of employment. But it's 2017, not 1967. As Susan Heavey reported for the Association of Health Care Journalists, in many parts of the U.S. health professionals have successfully partnered with advocates, local officials, and housing developers to "reinvent neighborhoods with [an] eye on health." If the leaders of the Cleveland Clinic wanted a road map for how to help rebuild the surrounding community, they could review one of 10 recent case studies posted by the Build Healthy Places Network, an organization whose mission "is to catalyze and support collaboration across the health and community development sectors, together working to improve low-income communities and the lives of people living in them."
On a national level, rather than allowing CHNAs to gather dust on a shelf (or the online equivalent), health policymakers could use them to allocate public funding for graduate medical education where it is needed most, rather than where it is currently going. As Dr. Melanie Raffoul, one of my past Policy Fellows, wrote recently in an analysis of Texas CHNAs and regional health partnership plans in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine:
Many [CHNAs] mentioned problems such as “low literacy,” “food deserts,” or “high levels of teen pregnancy.” Many of these concerns cannot be meaningfully addressed by hospitals, but they can be tackled through increased access to primary care and mental health services, and residency training sites are one way to provide this to the community. This should increase institutions' thinking about their role in larger community strategies to tackle community issues that affect health. Workforce gaps similarly need to be seen in this context—a community resource meant to resolve community needs. ... Community assessments could help refocus the use of publicly funded physician training as part of a broader hospital-community partnership for resolving health needs.
I began by stating that I didn't think that the Cleveland Clinic deserved to be ranked the #2 hospital in the nation, but since U.S. News and World Report already put it on that pedestal, the Clinic should live up to it by not only providing the best health care for their patients, but getting serious about improving the health of their community.