Consumer Reports investigates hospital safety

The magazine offers its rankings of the safest and most dangerous hospitals based on six criteria.

Consumer Reports: How Safe Is Your Hospital? Our New Ratings Find That Some Are Riskier Than Others
Infections, surgical mistakes, and other medical harm contribute to the deaths of 180,000 hospital patients a year, according to projections based on a 2010 report from the Department of Health and Human Services. Another 1.4 million are seriously hurt by their hospital care. And those figures apply only to Medicare patients. What happens to other people is less clear because most hospital errors go unreported and hospitals report on only a fraction of things that can go wrong (August 2012).

CBS (Video): Consumer Reports Ranks Most Dangerous, Safest Hospitals
For the first time, Consumer Reports magazine has investigated hospital safety - and the results will probably surprise you. Dr. John Santa, director of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center, says the magazine used six criteria: Infections; Communications about safety issues; The degree to which you come right back in the hospital after you've been discharged; Situations in which too many imaging tests that expose you to radiation are being done; Common complications in unsafe hospital; and Death rates for several conditions. The lowest-rated hospital in the country, he told "CBS This Morning: Saturday" co-hosts Rebecca Jarvis and Anthony Mason, was Sacred Heart Hospital in Chicago (7/7).