Massachusetts hospitals that were publicly identified as having higher-than-expected mortality rates for certain heart patients may subsequently avoid high-risk patients, according to a study in Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Interventions.
Researchers examined the effect of publicly reporting in-hospital mortality after percutaneous coronary intervention at Massachusetts hospitals from 2003 to 2010. At hospitals that were publicly identified as negative outliers (i.e., they had higher-than-expected mortality rates), the predicted mortality among PCI patients had a relative reduction of 18 percent compared with non-outlier institutions.
These results suggest that an unintended consequence of public reporting of PCI mortality rates may be avoidance of high-risk patients among hospitals with higher mortality rates, according to the study.
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