Medscape Medical News writes: No correlation exists between mortality rates and process measures reported to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare program, new research shows. To see whether performance in emergency medicine is associated with patient outcomes, researchers compared process measures for acute myocardial infarction with patient mortality rates. The quality measures that hospitals must report to CMS for acute myocardial infarction include median time to ECG, aspirin at arrival, percutaneous coronary intervention within 90 minutes of hospital arrival, and median time to transfer to another hospital for percutaneous coronary intervention. The researchers evaluated each of these four measures at 4481 hospitals using national Medicare data from the Hospital Compare program. When comparing risk-adjusted mortality across these groups, researchers found no significant association between hospital performance on process measures for AMI and patient-level AMI mortality at any time point for any of the measures. They found no evidence that hospitals performing better on most publicly reported ED process measures had better outcomes for patients with AMI.
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- Hospital Reporting Unrelated to Better Patient Outcomes – Medscape – Oct 16, 2018