Description: Compared to general hospitals, specialty orthopedic hospitals serve a healthier population of Medicare patients, a new study finds.

"We suspected that specialty orthopedic hospitals were selecting low-risk patients for admission, and that is what our analysis found," lead author Dr. Peter Cram, assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Iowa, said in a prepared statement.

"But we also found that complications were less common in specialty hospitals even after accounting for the types of patients each hospital admitted -- this was quite surprising," Cram added.

The findings are published in the August issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery.

The researchers, from the University of Iowa and the Department of Veterans Affairs Iowa City Health Care System, found that Medicare patients who received hip or knee replacement at specialty orthopedic hospitals were about 40 percent less likely to suffer post-surgery compli