Outcomes Improving for Cardiovascular Diseases

Have recent efforts to improve care for people with cardiovascular disease been successful? To find out, investigators examined rates of hospitalization, mortality, and readmission during the past decade in a national cohort of more than 30 million Medicare beneficiaries, focusing on patients with unstable angina, myocardial infarction (MI), heart failure, and ischemic stroke.

Hospitalization rates declined for all four conditions across all age, gender, and racial groups, with some variation between states and hospitals. MI hospitalizations, for example, dropped from 1283 to 801 per 100,000 person-years from 1999 through 2011, an annual rate of decline of 4.6%. The adjusted rate of 30-day mortality during this period declined 29% for MI, 13…