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MONDAY, Oct. 16 (HealthDay News) -- Before you check into a hospital, it may be wise to check out the hospital's quality.
That's because treatment outcomes at U.S. hospitals vary widely, depending on which state, city or individual hospital provides the care, a new report finds.
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The report, HealthGrades Hospital Quality in America Study, found that patients have a 69 percent lower risk of dying at "5-star" hospitals compared with "1-star" institutions.
Moreover, the gap between the best- and worst-performing hospitals has actually widened by about 5 percent since last year's report -- even though overall hospital death rates have dropped by almost 8 percent.
For their ninth annual report, HealthGrades -- an independent health care ratings group -- analyzed 40.6 million Medicare hospital records from 2003 through 2005. Based on this data, they assessed the quality of care at more than 5,000 hospitals.
The report uses a star rating system that tells people whether a particular hospital's performance has been "best" (5-star), "as expected" (3-star), or "poor" (1-star) on a particular procedure or diagnosis across 28 categories. The ratings are based on patient outcomes, specifically, the risk of dying, or having serious complications.
"Across 28 conditions, like heart failure and heart attack, and procedures, like bypass surgery, knee replacement, etc., there is a large variation between hospitals," concluded the report's author, Dr. Samantha Collier, vice president of medical affairs at HealthGrades. "Some of these differences can be quite large -- up to 90 percent."
In fact, if all hospitals were 5-star rated, the lives of 302,403 Medicare patients could have been saved from 2003 through 2005, the researchers estimated. Moreover, 50 percent of preventable deaths were linked to just four diagnoses: heart failure, community-acquired pneumonia, sepsis (blood infection) and respiratory failure, the researchers found.
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