A USA Today article published earlier this month (‘Double failure’ at USA’s hospitals, dated July 9, 2009) discussed a Medicare analysis of U.S. hospitals which found that some hospitals have higher death rates and higher patient readmission rates than other hospitals. “At 5.9% of hospitals, patients with pneumonia died at rates significantly higher than the national average. With heart failure, 3.4% of hospitals had death rates higher than the average, and 1.2% of hospitals were higher when it came to heart attack.”
I don’t understand how only 1.2% of hospitals can have a death rate higher than the national average (shouldn’t 50% be higher than the average?), but what was most interesting to me was that the article mainly focused on how hospitals in richer, more populated areas tend to have slightly lower death and readmission rates. I’m sure that the death rate is, in part, determined by causes related to household income, such as the types of food people eat and how much they exercise. However, a hospital can’t necessarily control how high the quality of life is in its neighborhood. A root cause analysis of why one hospital’s death rates are higher than another’s should probably focus more on the things that the hospital can control, that is, the hospital’s internal processes.
Want to learn more about healthcare root cause analysis? See our patient safety blog.
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