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Quality measures don't accurately reflect outcomes

Respiratory Care Weekly, December 13, 2006

Hospitals with high and low Medicare performance measures found little difference in their rates of death for heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia, according to the December 13 Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers analyzed Medicare's own data from 3,657 hospitals for calendar year 2004. The difference between the 25th percentile in the Medicare quality measures versus the 75th percentile for death from those three conditions was negligible by a few thousandths of a percentage point improvement.

"Our study suggests that in the case of hospital performance, CMS' current set of performance measures are not tightly linked to patient outcomes," the authors concluded. "These findings should not undermine current efforts to improve healthcare quality through performance measurement and reporting. However, attention should be focused on finding measures of healthcare quality that are more tightly linked to patient outcomes. Only then will performance measurement live up to expectations for improving healthcare quality."

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