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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

University Health Care is infected again with false pride

   University of Utah Health Care is once again revealing its unhealthy need for recognition and status that it hasn't earned. These people have some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder that is manifested by manic braggadocio.
   Will somebody please grab a hypodermic and fill it with some dignity and integrity?? They could use a big shot of it.
   As we reported in February, the U. finessed its way to being named the Number One academic medical center in the country by essentially reverse-engineering a top-secret ranking algorithm, so it could focus on those criteria that were going to be measured. It was a brilliant strategy, but ethically dubious.
   Now it is claiming that it has been named first among the region's health care providers by U.S. News & World Report
   That isn't true. 

   It has been named the Number One hospital within the Salt Lake metro area, which -- according to the magazine --  encompasses only Salt Lake City, Ogden and Clearfield. 
   That isn't "the region," and the University knows it.
    It is also of some interest to know what the U. thinks of  U.S. News & World Report when it does poorly in the ratings.
     "The U.S. News and World Report ranking is very clearly a measure of a number of factors, including reputation among all hospitals in the country – in fact reputation scores make up nearly one-third of the hospital rankings," a hospital official stated earlier this year. "We don’t think the U.S. News rankings are wrong; we just don’t believe they are necessarily the best measure of quality."