RESEARCH - Hospital ratings may not be true quality measure

[Guest guest]

Hospital Ratings May Not Be True Quality Measure

Washington Post

Wednesday, December 13, 2006; Page A02

Conventional wisdom holds that one sure way to improve health-care quality

is to measure it. A study being published today in the Journal of the

American Medical Association comes to the unconventional conclusion that

it's not necessarily so.

The study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's School of

Medicine found that going to a hospital that scored well on

Medicare-mandated quality measures did not significantly reduce a patient's

risk of dying.

The study examined 2004 data from 3,657 hospitals, comparing their

performance on quality-of-care measures for treating heart attacks, heart

failure and pneumonia with the death rates for the same patients. The

quality measures charted such matters as whether patients who had a heart

attack received aspirin within 24 hours of being admitted and how soon

patients with bacterial pneumonia were given antibiotics.

Patients at hospitals that scored near the top on the quality-of-care

measures did do better than those at hospitals near the bottom -- but not

dramatically so.

For every 1,000 heart attack patients, there were about five fewer deaths at

the better-performing hospitals than at the lower-performing ones, the study

found. The figures were similar for patients with heart failure and

pneumonia.

M. Werner, an assistant professor of medicine and the study's lead

author, said the results point up the need for more meaningful quality

measures.

" Measuring quality is clearly a good idea, " Werner said. " It's a great first

step. But at the same time . . . there are other things that are making

outcomes different at different hospitals, and we are not capturing those

differences using these measures. There is a fallacy in assuming that just

taking these measures and applying them to hospitals is going to reveal

important things about the differences in quality across hospitals. "

-- Lee

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/12/AR2006121201530.\

html

Not an MD

I'll tell you where to go!

Mayo Clinic in Rochester

http://www.mayoclinic.org/rochester

s Hopkins Medicine

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org