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The eternal effort to improve short-term mortality and prevent readmissions raises a specter of individual healthcare providers contributing to that struggle. Specifically, do practice differences among hospitalists contribute to patient outcomes and use parameters?
In a complex multilevel analysis, researchers examined the specific contributions of 1100 hospitalists, 268 hospitals, and 131,000 Texas Medicare beneficiaries to length of stay, readmission rates, and 30-day mortality from 2006 to 2009. Critically ill patients were excluded. Although average length of stay varied widely among hospitalist data, much of the variance was due to hospitals. Hospitalist data exhibited little variation in mortality or readmission rate. Case mix indexes…