Composite quality measures for common inpatient medical conditions.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Public reporting on quality aims to help patients select better hospitals. However, individual quality measures are suboptimal in identifying superior and inferior hospitals based on outcome performance.

Objective

To combine structure, process, and outcome measures into an empirically derived composite quality measure for heart failure (HF), acute myocardial infarction (AMI), and pneumonia (PNA). To assess how well the composite measure predicts future high and low performers, and explains variance in future hospital mortality.

Research design

Using national Medicare data, we created a cohort of older patients treated at an acute care hospital for HF (n=1,203,595), AMI (n=625,595), or PNA (n=1,234,299). We ranked hospitals on the basis of their July 2005 to

SUBMITTER: Chen LM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4181330 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature