Loading...
Multiple studies have debunked the conventional wisdom that hospital-wide mortality is a good indicator of quality of care. Investigators in Massachusetts issued a call for models to calculate hospital-level metrics of quality across 3 fiscal years using a standardized discharge dataset from acute care hospitals. Applicants were asked specifically to provide estimates of risk for in-hospital death and to use hospital-wide mortality to identify quality outliers. Investigators analyzed results derived from different models.
Comparisons among the four evaluated models showed many inconsistencies. Because of variations in inclusion and exclusion criteria, the percentages of discharges represented in the various models ranged from 28% to 95%. Ris…