Agency to Post Hospital Heart Death Rates

Consumers soon can compare hospitals’ heart attack and heart failure death rates on the Internet, a U.S. government agency said.

The main purpose of all this is to improve quality, Dr. Michael Rapp of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told USA Today. If I’m running a hospital and see that I fall in a category that’s worse than 98 percent of hospitals, that’s going to grab my attention.

Experts said 30-day death rates offer a more reliable measure of a hospital’s performance than in-patient deaths. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services previewed the program in December by telling nearly 4,000 hospitals how their 30-day rates for 2003 compared with the national Medicare death rates of 17.8 percent for heart attacks and 11.6 percent for heart failure.

Officials said they expect the results of the analysis to be available in June, when the agency posts data from July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006, on a Medicare Web site called Hospital Compare, hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.

Some hospital administrators, said they support the goal, but warned that statistics could be misleading.