Leaders of some major teaching hospitals criticize government safety rankings.

The Boston Globe /Kaiser Health News (2/13, Rau) reports, "Medicare's first public effort to identify hospitals with patient safety problems has pinpointed many prestigious teaching hospitals in Boston and around the nation, raising concerns about quality at these places but also bolstering objections that the government's measurements are skewed." The data indicate that "Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, both affiliated with Harvard Medical School; and Boston Medical Center, affiliated with Boston University, were among those having substantially more complications than the average hospital." However, "leaders of a number of the nation's major teaching hospitals are questioning the accuracy and fairness of the data, saying they do not properly account for how severely ill their patients are."