Here are several reasons why ExpertMapper is superior to the "Best Hospitals" list published annually by the magazine U.S. News and World Report.
Just within digestive diseases, for example, ExpertMapper can identify experts in dozens of conditions, including:
US News defines "best" mathematically, based on several factors that they weigh as they see fit. For example, their definition of "best" heavily weighs operations and procedures. If you are not having an operation or procedure, then their definition of "best" probably doesn't apply to you.
Today's best known methods for rating expertise are thinly disguised popularity contests. These methods are based on the results of surveys sent to doctors, asking them to rate colleagues and hospitals.
The problems of survey-based methods are overwhelming:
Most doctors are small business owners, and when some silly magazine survey asks "who is the best?" it is perfectly acceptable to say "Doctors who refer patients to me are the best!" It is also acceptable to say "Doctors who compete against me are clods." There is absolutely no ethical prohibition against responses like these, and there is no avoiding this problem.
A hospital can improve its position in a survey ranking by making a concerted effort to improve its public image. Any physician in practice today -- and many who are not -- receives dozens of multi-colored glossy brochures each year from hospitals near and far, advertising their super-spiffy programs in one disease or another. These brochures can assuredly help build a reputation that affects a survey ranking.
If, say, hospital XYZ had a certain cardiovascular reputation in the 1970s, that aura can live in doctors' memories for the next 40 years, tainting for all that time their opinions of hospital XYZ's cardiovascular services.
Actually, this is a guess, because sponsors of these surveys never disclose what percentage of their solicited doctors respond to the survey. It is reasonable to suspect, however, that the response rate is atrocious, because doctors are very busy and have no motivation to answer questions about hospitals halfway across the country. So, if something like 20% of doctors answer a survey, it is reasonable to believe these doctors are somehow different from the 80% that don't... one might suspect these 20% of doctors have extra time on their hands. Why do they have such time? No patients?
Think of the thousands of possible geographical locations just in the United States and the thousands of possible diseases in each of those locations. It would be cost-prohibitive to ask survey questions in enough detail to produce useful guidance about each disease in each locality. Surveys cut corners on medical details. For example, one popular survey ranks hospitals based on cancer care. This can be very misleading, as it assumes that one cancer is the same as any other cancer. However, if you had testicular cancer, for example, the best place in the world (according to ExpertMapper) is an institution that is not at the top of the survey rankings for cancer in general. And, as a further example, if you had the "multiple myeloma" type of cancer, it is unlikely that a general ranking of cancer centers would put the University of Arkansas near the top, even though it has one of the best myeloma programs in the world.
Surveys cut corners on medical details. For example, one popular survey ranks hospitals based on cancer care. This can be very misleading, as it assumes that one cancer is the same as any other cancer. However, if you had testicular cancer, for example, the best place in the world (according to ExpertMapper) is an institution that is not at the top of the survey rankings for cancer in general. And, as a further example, if you had the "multiple myeloma" type of cancer, it is unlikely that a general ranking of cancer centers would put the University of Arkansas near the top, even though it has one of the best myeloma programs in the world.
If the most expert physician or hospital for your problem is in a foreign country, ExpertMapper will tell you. No one else will.
To provide a veneer of scientific respectability, some hospital ranking systems combine survey and popularity data with measurements of clinical performance inside the hospital. Unfortunately, these measurements are so primitive that they are unrevealing about the expertise of the hospital or its physicians.
Some methods of finding "the best" hospital use objective measurements of hospitals. For example, a hospital is penalized for having a high rate of infections after surgery. Although objective measurement should be praised, most of today's measurements are irrelevant to most people: Post-operative infection rates don't much matter to someone not undergoing an operation, or to someone never admitted to the hospital at all.
Objective clinical measurements of hospital and physician performance are, today, so primitive that only the simplest things can be measured -- things so simple that even a medical student knows "the right thing to do." For example, it is universal practice to give aspirin prescriptions to all but a tiny fraction of heart attack survivors. This is so well-agreed-upon that it takes no brains at all for a physician to write such a prescription. ... And this is precisely why rating agencies feel safe monitoring whether physicians do this, and why the agencies feel safe penalizing physicians who do not. If the decision required judgment and expertise, the office-dwelling minions of the rating agencies could not reliably decide whether a physician's judgment was correct or not. Thus, clinical measurements today measure anti-expertise!
For example, it is universal practice to give aspirin prescriptions to all but a tiny fraction of heart attack survivors. This is so well-agreed-upon that it takes no brains at all for a physician to write such a prescription. ... And this is precisely why rating agencies feel safe monitoring whether physicians do this, and why the agencies feel safe penalizing physicians who do not. If the decision required judgment and expertise, the office-dwelling minions of the rating agencies could not reliably decide whether a physician's judgment was correct or not.
Thus, clinical measurements today measure anti-expertise!
ExpertMapper is not perfect, but it is far better at what it seeks to measure than is any other ranking system.
It is immune to public relations manipulation and it is not a popularity contest.
It can identify expertise in remarkably specialized areas. It can, for example, identify experts in hepatitis B, ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, bariatric surgery, and pancreatitis whereas current methods lump them all together in the nearly useless single field of "digestive diseases."
If the world expert is in Canada, Japan, or Timbuktu, ExpertMapper will tell you.
It looks back a certain number of years (9 or 10), and no more. Insitutions trying to rest on their laurels can be detected.