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Article: Measuring hospital mortality rates: are 30-day data enough?
- Article from:
- Health Services Research
- Article date:
- February 1, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Health Research and Educational Trust. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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For over a decade, risk-adjusted mortality rates have been used as measures of hospital quality. Recently, however, short-term measures, such as inpatient mortality and 30-day postadmission mortality, have been joined by longer-term measures such as 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month mortality. In fact, as of 1991, the Health Care Financing Administration began to routinely publish risk-adjusted mortality models for Medicare patients using 30-, 90-, and 180-day mortality rates (Sullivan and Wilensky 1991; Sullivan and Toby 1992). Other studies using longer postadmission or postprocedure time periods to identify hospitals with unusually high or low death rates, or to relate ...