In This Issue:

- Everyone Has an Agenda

- How Executive Pay Skews Some Rankings

- Learn More From These Resources

- Excerpt: The Dicey Connection between Hospital Ratings and Superior Patient Care:

When patient check in to San Francisco General Hospital, they're met by a "chief patient experience officer" whose job is to treat them with respect and personalized attention instead of the assembly line all too common in U.S. health care.

Call me cynical, but this might just connect to a federal effort to compensate hospitals at least partly on the basis of surveys of inpatient experiences that include quality-of-life issues as well as medical concerns and treatment. The happier the patients, the thinking goes, the better the hospital's bottom line.

It's hardly a straight line between patient satisfaction and hospital success, much less superior care. This month we look at why it's so difficult to assess hospital performance, and the standards by which it should be judged.