Choosing Hospitals

Choosing hospitals, like choosing insurance, seems like a super daunting task. Sure you can look at the newsmagazine "Best of..." lists but they are at best quasi-scientific and probably have little to do with the experience that one individual will actually have. You can also visit the Medicare Hospital Compare website but again it is a bunch of statistics that may or may not be relevant. A couple questions come to mind as I look at the stats on their site:
- Since these stats/surveys are about/from Medicare patients, who are generally older, sicker, and less well educated than I am how do I translate them for my own use?
- When I am wading through the stats how do I know what is a significant difference. Look at this graph about how well nurses communicated with patients. Does a 5% difference really mean that one is better than another? I assume that the sample size is large enough that these numbers are meaningful but they could be skewed by the department that most of the patients were in.

Ok so I haven't solved anything but at least I made a note that there is a place where you can get survey results that provide statistics about hospitals and that you can use these in an attempt to compare one hospital to another.