Rankings for hospitals reveal little
Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, December 12, 2006
CHICAGO – New research offers this warning to consumers shopping for top-notch hospitals: Many that are highly rated by government regulators only have marginally lower patient death rates.
The researchers evaluated 3,657 hospitals nationwide that are listed on a Centers for Medicare &Medicaid Services Web site. The Hospital Compare site shows how hospitals stack up on recommended treatments and is designed to help consumers comparison shop for health care.
The study examined three conditions that often lead to hospitalization – heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia – and found that death rates for patients with those diseases were only slightly lower at top-rated hospitals in 2004 than at the lowest-rated hospitals.
The University of Pennsylvania researchers, Dr. Rachel Werner and Eric Bradlow, looked at recommended treatments for hospitalized heart attack patients: aspirin and beta blocker drugs within 24 hours of arrival and prescribed at discharge and ACE inhibitor drugs given during the stay. The percentage of heart attack patients who died was close to 7 percent at both groups of hospitals, with high-rated ones losing 0.5 percent fewer patients over the one-year period.
Two heart failure treatments were evaluated: assessment of the heart’s blood-pumping function and use of ACE inhibitors. The death rate was close to 3 percent for both, with the difference between best and worst hospitals just 0.1 percent.
Three pneumonia treatments were evaluated: appropriate timing for starting antibiotics, vaccinating against pneumonia, and measuring blood-oxygen levels. The death rate was 0.5 percent higher at low-rated hospitals, but both groups lost about 4 percent of pneumonia patients.
Hospital Compare: www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov
