A typical patient, on average, has a 69% lower chance of dying at the nation’s five-star-rated hospitals compared with the one-star hospitals, according to the Ninth Annual HealthGrades Hospital Quality in America Study. This “quality chasm” between the highest- and lowest-performing hospitals has grown by approximately 5% since last year’s study, even as overall mortality rates have improved by nearly 8%. The study, which analyzed 40.6 million Medicare hospitalization records from 2003 to 2005, claims that 302,403 Medicare lives could have been saved during that time period if all hospitals performed at the quality level of top-rated hospitals across the 18 procedures and diagnoses studied. Fifty percent of the potentially preventable deaths were associated with four diagnoses: heart failure, community-acquired pneumonia, sepsis, and respiratory failure. According to the study, five-star-rated hospitals improved their risk-adjusted mortality rates over three years by 19% more than the U.S. hospital average and 57% more than one-star-rated hospitals.
