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A new study indicates the need to change how fatality figures are read and recorded in order to better measure hospital quality.
Today, the normal course of action for measuring hospital fatalities is to simply measure how many patients die during their hospital stay. However, there is no standard, controlled time involved in this calculation. Therefore, those hospitals, which hold their patients the longest, are disadvantaged in hospital rankings because patients have more opportunity to die when statistics are being measured -- during the hospital stay.
Instead, the study, published earlier this month in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine suggests a standardized time horizon -- the researchers offered 30 days -- from the date of admission, to measure patient mortality. This time period includes time after being released from the hospital for earlier admissions and does not count extra time in the hospital for later discharges. This might still not adequately quantify the efficacy of each hospital, but it will go a long way toward comparing hospitals by knocking out a key variable.
This study, by the Yale School of Medicine's Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, compared both approaches on patients who suffered heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia -- conditions for which 1/3 to 1/2 of deaths within 30 days occur post-discharge. Dependant on the method, quality results varied wildly among hospitals.
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