Where Does Your State Rank On Health-System Performance

Business Week features a new survey by the Commonwealth Fund that ranks the health-systems performance of all 50 states and DC in "The Sorry States of Health Care." The full report detail can be found here at the Commonwealth Fund website.

The survey statistics on the need to increase preventative care and high levels of avoidable hospital admissions struck me an interesting (but not surprising).

West Virginia comes in at 44 of 51 in the survey. (full details on West Virginia here and here). The state ranking was a product of aggregating measurements in 32 benchmarks spread across five categories: access to health care (determined by the number of insured residents); quality of care; unnecessary hospital use and procedures; equity of access based on income and ethnicity; and the overall health of the population.