Some of the leading teaching hospitals are taking issue with public Medicare data that points to such institutions, including Cleveland Clinic, Geisinger Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital, as poor patient safety performers, Kaiser Health News and The Boston Globe reported.

Major teaching hospitals are 10 times more likely to have serious complications, according to the KHN analysis. Thirty-one percent of major teaching hospitals have serious complications that are worse than the national average, while only 4 percent of non-teaching hospitals do, according to Hospital Compare and the Association of American Medical Colleges.

However, some institutions disagree with Medicare’s safety rankings, arguing the measurements are skewed.

Shannon Phillips, a quality and patient safety officer at The Cleveland Clinic, said its high rates of accidental tears and lacerations and serious blood clots come from thorough documentation rather than poor care. ‘People are careful at documenting, almost to a fault, things that are incidental to the case,’ Phillips said.

This isn’t the first time teaching hospitals have ended up at the bottom of the patient safety performance list. Consumer Reports last summer revealed that renowned teaching hospitals did not perform well in preventing bloodstream infections with high rates of such infections.

Dr. Ira Nash, chief medical officer […]