Human Services News

From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:

A new study from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) shows that patients who go to hospitals ranked higher according to specific quality measures have a lower chance of dying than patients treated at lower-ranked hospitals.

The researchers calculate that if the lowest performing hospitals had similar patient mortality rates to those of top-performing hospitals, 2,200 fewer elderly Americans would die each year in the surveyed hospitals from acute myocardial infarction (AMI), congestive heart failure (CHF) and pneumonia, three common medical conditions.

"These findings show that these quality indicators, which are widely available on the web, are very helpful in identifying low mortality hospitals," said Ashish Jha, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at HSPH and lead author of the study.

The Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA), a public-private collaboration that includes the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the American Hospital Association, aims to improve the quality of care at the nation's hospitals by reporting how hospitals perform on detailed quality measures.

The results showed that, when compared with hospitals in the lowest quartile, hospitals in the top quartile of performance had nearly 1 percent lower mortality among patients with AMI, 0.4 percent among patients with CHF and 0.8 among patients with pneumonia.

Programs and projects range from the molecular biology of AIDS vaccines to the epidemiology of cancer; from risk analysis to violence prevention; from maternal and children's health to quality of care measurement; from health care management to international health and human rights.

Read more from this post.