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CMS to post hospitals' heart-related death rates

Hospitalist Leadership Connection, May 30, 2007

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced that it will begin posting broad comparisons of the death rates for heart attack and heart failure on Hospital Compare (www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov), its Web site that promotes reporting on hospital quality of care, according to a May 23 article in USA Today.

According to the article, the postings, which will be available in June, represent a departure for CMS, which generally has kept such data private. More than 10 hospitals provided USA Today with their own confidential heart attack and heart failure death rates, providing a glimpse into the type of data that will be available on the CMS site.

CMS will name "high-risk" hospitals (i.e., hospitals where patients are more likely to die from heart attacks and heart failure than patients who go elsewhere) along with others on the site, but will not take corrective action, the article states. Rather, CMS hopes to "shame them into doing better," according to the article.

Michael Rapp, CMS director of quality measurement, is quoted in the article as saying, "If I'm running a hospital, and I see that I fall in a category that's worse than 98% of hospitals, that's going to grab my attention."

The full article is at: www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-05-22-death-rates_N.htm.

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