Have you ever wondered how your local hospital’s maternity ward stacks up against the national scorecard? Considering my wife is almost four and a half months along in her pregnancy with our third child, I checked out our hospital, Cedar Sinai, and although I agree with their three star rating (out of five), I admit I’m curious about the local five starred ones.

I’ve just come across one company, HealthGrades.Com, that makes it their business to track hospitals, nursing homes and physicians through a formulated rating system. They do not rate (’best’ or ‘worst’) the physicians per say instead, to help consumers compare physicians, they profile physicians and provide national benchmark data. They have a number of tiered composite systems for rating both nursing homes and hospitals but most of them come for a price (generally $18-20 bucks will get you the full report).

Digging deeper into the subject, I’ve found there are a number of ‘top hospital’ lists out there, and like anything it seems the deeper you dig the more unclear the findings can become. I think what is most important here is that there are some pretty robust tools available to those who want to find out how their local hospital does compared with regional, state and national averages. And maybe the best way to evaluate a medical facility is based on the overall composite and a given procedure (if it applies). As an example, Cedar Sinai rates average for their maternity ward but overall has a great rating.

There are quite a few options when looking for the best hospital or if you want to look-up your pediatrician’s scorecard. Strangely enough some of the most incomplete or uninformative sites I found are the government sites, go figure. Here is a current list of hospital, physicians, and nursing home rating sites that have struck me as somewhat objective and informative for consumer use;

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