You are hurt. You are having a baby. You need surgery. You were in a car accident. You want to pick the best possible hospital in Maryland to treat you, right? To make the right choice, you need some idea of the quality of the hospital that is treating you.
The Leapfrog Group, a non-profit watchdog organization, conducts biannual analysis and provides safety grades of health care systems found in each state across the country. Hospital ratings are like looking at Consumer Reports. Are they perfect? Not even close. Will you get more by looking at hospital ratings than an hour of independent research on your own? I think you absolutely will.
Leapfrog has done so since 2012. But the Leapfrog rankings excluded Maryland until 2017, which I talk about at the end of this post for those who are interested.