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Hospital Impact has been ranked one of the top 50 healthcare blogs by Wikio.
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by Dan Bowman, FierceHealthcare
This week, FiercePracticeManagement reported on a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that raised quite a few eyebrows with regards to medical school rankings. The study looked at things from a "social mission" point of view, essentially ranking the nation's 141 medical schools by how well they produced graduates who practiced primary care, worked in areas with a federally designated shortage of health professionals and belonged to underrepresented minority groups. While some relatively unknown schools like Morehouse School of Medicine, Meharry Medical College and Howard University topped the list, traditionally high-ranking med schools like Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins were ranked much lower.
Dr. Candice Chen, one of the authors and an investigator at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, talked to FierceHealthcare about the study, and why she thinks it's important to also look closely at experience and intangibles when it comes to our doctors, as opposed to just test scores.
FierceHealthcare: In the paper, you specifically discuss medical school rankings (like the one created by U.S. News & World Report) and their flaws. What do you think can be done to address these flaws, especially considering that you constantly see schools like Johns Hopkins and Duke atop most medical school rankings, but on your list they rank near the bottom of the pack?
Candice Chen: The interesting thing about U.S. News & World Report is that they do two different ranking systems right now. They've been doing their primary-care rankings now for a good decade-plus. Prior to adding the primary-care ranking, they really valued research, and in their main ranking they still do that. So there's always a question of "what do we value in our medical schools?" It's not that we shouldn't value research and the research that they've produced, but sometimes I think we value research in the absence of valuing some of the things that are looked at in our paper.
