When the ambulance comes...

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...tell 'em St. David's
...or better yet, Scott and White in Round Rock.


I have always thought Seton was the best hospital in Austin. And I'd never go to Brac. Heck-it's the public hospital so it couldn't be very good.

Well, as it turns out there's a Medicare Hospital Comparison website that lets you see how Austin hospitals stack up. I chose to compare Seton, Brac and St. David's because they're all within a couple miles of my house.

Patients were asked a series of ten questions. St. David's consistently came out on top-by less than 5 percentage points, followed by Seton then Brac. But there was rarely more than a 5% difference.

Mostly the questions were "customer service" type questions. "Patients who reported that their nurses "Always" communicated well." etc. There wasn't a "I recovered" question. So who even knows whether they got successful care.

General rating:
Patients who gave their hospital a rating of 9 or 10 on a scale from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest).
St. David's- 72%
Seton- 63%
Brac- 61%

Just thought you'd like to know if you end up in an ambulance and they ask where you'd like to go.

One additional note: The number of hospitals you can compare is about a dozen. Just to see, I did an additional comparison using hospitals in the 'burbs. They scored up to 10 percentage points higher on the general rating question.
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