US Hospital Death Rates For Different Conditions Now Online

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Main Category: IT / Internet / E-mail
Also Included In: Medicare / Medicaid / SCHIP
Article Date: 21 Aug 2008 - 4:00 PDT

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The US Department for Health and Human Services (HHS) has enhanced the government's Hospital Compare website to include death rates for the past two years from pneumonia as well as from heart attack and heart failure for individual hospitals throughout the country, making it easier for patients and their families to find out how the chances of surviving these conditions varies among hospitals.

The Hospital Compare website is managed by Medicare and Medicaid Services, an agency of the HHS. It was launched in 2005 for the benefit of patients and hospitals. The hope is that hospitals will improve quality of care as patients become more aware of how they perform relative to each other.

It now offers the facility to review mortality rates over the past two years for deaths from pneumonia, heart attack, and heart failure. People can then see how a hospital's death rates compares to the national average for these conditions (pneumonia 11.4 per cent, heart attack, 16.1 per cent, and heart failure, 11.1 per cent.

Before the latest enhancements, site visitors could only see whether a hospital was above or below the national average. The website, which already allowed browsers to view statistics on patient satisfaction and experience, now also gives figures on the quality of care received by children.

According to CNN, some hospitals and other experts say the information could be misleading because some hospitals have higher proportions of very sick patients than others.

However, the figures for each hospital don't come from a simple process of taking the total of patients treated for each condition and then dividing it by the number of deaths. The new mortality rates have been what the HHS calls "risk adjusted" to take account of patients' total sickness burden. Thus the figures for hospitals treating lots of very sick patients who have several conditions are weighted differently to that of hospitals that treat few very sick patients.

Rich Umbdenstock, president and CEO the American Hospital Association, told CNN he welcomed the initiative, saying that patients and their families are keen to know mortality and survival rates. Pneumonia, heart attack and heart failure are "three areas in which we have national agreement in how to define, measure and report outcomes," he told the news agency. This information helps people make decisions about health care and it will help hospitals do a better job, he said.

However, not everyone in the healthcare industry agrees that it will be useful for patients. While it may in the short term help hospitals make changes and improve performance, "for individual patients who want to choose their own care, it can be more misleading than helpful," said Jeffrey Kirsch, chairman of anesthesiology at Oregon Health and Science University and chairman of the university's professional board. But he did agree that the general idea of giving the public more information on hospital performance was a good thing, said the CNN report.

By listening to patient feedback on how easy the information is to use and how useful it is, and getting that side of it balanced with the need to portray hospital performance in a fair and reliable way, in time the service may well meet its declared goal of informing patient choice and improving hospital performance.

Click here for Hospital Compare website (HHS).

Sources: CNN, HHS.

Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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