Life Expectancy after Myocardial Infarction, According to Hospital Performance

In an analysis of more than 119,000 patients with acute MI admitted to over 1800 hospitals, patients treated in high-performing hospitals (with low 30-day risk-standardized mortality) had longer life expectancies than those treated in low-performing hospitals. Public reporting has become a mainstay of national efforts to improve the quality of care delivered in U.S. hospitals. 1 Increasingly, risk-standardized mortality rates are used to benchmark quality and gauge hospital performance because they reflect meaningful and widely interpretable results of hospital care. 2 , 3 Since 2007, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has reported hospital-specific 30-day risk-standardized mortality rates for several common conditions, and more recently, risk-standardized mortality rates have been incorporated into payment policies. 4 – 6 Although several studies have evaluated the association of condition-specific risk-standardized mortality rates with other short-term quality metrics, 7 – 16 it is not known . . .