JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
The most recent articles from:
JAMA
-
To assess whether risk-adjusted mortality rates for hospitals reflect primarily chance variation. ⋯ Risk-adjusted outcomes for CABG patients derived from administrative data exhibit substantial patterns of consistency. Such patterns cannot be detected for low-risk patients but are evident for the top quartile of patients stratified by risk. Even with reporting lags and changes in hospital outcomes over time, a policy of channeling high-risk patients away from high-outlier hospitals and toward low-outlier hospitals could lower their overall risk-adjusted mortality rate by 45% [corrected].