Hospital Death Rates Revealed

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/08/20/hospital.deaths/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

(Excerpts)

For the first time, death rates during the past two years from pneumonia are included with death rates from heart attack and heart failure for individual hospitals across the country. These numbers can be compared with the national mortality rate for heart attack (16.1 percent), heart failure (11.1 percent) and pneumonia (11.4 percent).

In the past, the information specified only whether a hospital was performing at, above or below the national average, without disclosing numbers.

Hospital Compare http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/Hospital/Search/Welcome.asp?version=default&browser=IE%7C6%7CWinXP&language=English&defaultstatus=0&pagelist=Home  is run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In addition to the pneumonia mortality rates, the Web site recently added statistics on the quality of hospital care received by children. The new data join information on process of care, patient satisfaction and patient experience.

[Harlan Krumholz, cardiologist and professor at Yale] "I do hope that it empowers groups of patients and community groups and hospital boards to engage in a conversation with their institution. They really need to be held accountable," he said. "This is a tool that can improve the conversation."

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My friend Eleanor died of a hospital-acquired infection in a hospital which had an extremely high rate of such infections.  According to the experts, if not for that infection, she would have recovered from the illness that sent her to the hospital; there was no question in their minds that the hospital, not the original illness, was entirely responsible for her death.

That was almost 25 years before the hospital was finally closed as being hazardous to patients' health.

As Dr. Krumholz says, "They really need to be held accountable."  And a lot faster than decades later.

That 11-16% of patients who died are all someone's friend or loved one.  Doctors cannot lose sight of that fact.  We may be a virtual stranger to the doctor, but someone's life will be permanently changed by losing someone close to them, or even if that someone close to them survives but is left with a disability that affects the rest of their life.  Every patient deserves the best medical care available, not just the ones the doctor has a long-term relationship with, or the ones who share the doctor's gender or ethnic group, or the ones the doctor thinks are rich or otherwise deserving of extra effort on his part.

It does not escape my notice that I got better treatment by members of a certain medical group when I was employed/insured than I did after I became unable to work and they assumed I was uninsured or on Medi-Cal.  In fact, there were more restrictions on my care when I was insured, because that HMO capitated payment, whereas when I went back after I stopped working, I had a different insurance policy, where the more treatment/tests they ordered, the more they would have been paid.  I sincerely believe that if the doctors had been aware that I still had good insurance, I wasn't on Medi-Cal, they would have treated me better, but like everything else, they assumed they knew everything about me and didn't have to ask.