About Hospital Quality

Hospital quality measures indicate how well a hospital provides care for its patients. Measurements on this Web site currently relate to:

heart conditions
pneumonia care
surgical infection prevention
performance of coronary artery bypass graft, angioplasty or pediatric heart surgery

While these measures have been proven the most useful indicators of quality care, a hospital's overall quality cannot be expressed by its scores on these measures alone.

You are encouraged to use the information available here to begin conversations with your doctor, hospital representatives, or other health care professionals, as well as with family members, friends, and associates who may have direct experience with a hospital. We have provided a checklist of other information that can be of value when choosing a hospital.

If you have a complaint about the quality of the medical care you or a loved one received at a hospital, first contact the hospital's patient advocate or contact your state Quality Improvement Organization .

How Hospital Quality is Determined

This Web site uses recommended care and outcome measures to determine hospital quality, however a hospital's overall quality cannot be expressed by its scores on these measures alone.

Recommended Care

Recommended care varies according to the particular circumstances of a given patient. For example, most heart attack patients should be given aspirin upon arrival at the hospital because aspirin helps to dissolve blood clots. However, some people should not take aspirin because of allergic reactions. Therefore, in the measurement of how many heart attack patients received aspirin at the hospital, patients who are allergic to aspirin are not counted. Each measure counts only those patients for whom the treatment is deemed appropriate. In other words, of the patients who should have received the treatment, what percentage actually received it?

Information on how often a hospital provides recommended care and treatment to eligible patients is converted into percentages that can be compared with other hospitals and statewide averages. These recommended procedures include:

care that a patient should receive upon arrival at the hospital
care that should occur during the hospital stay
advice or instructions patients should receive when discharged from the hospital

How are data collected and used?

These measures are based on the most recent and accepted scientific evidence about treatments that get the best results. Health care experts constantly evaluate the evidence to make sure these measures reflect the most up-to-date information.

Outcome Measures

Outcome measures refer to what happens to a patient as a result of the treatment received. The New York State Department of Health has been studying the effects of patient and treatment characteristics (risk factors) on outcomes for patients with heart disease since 1994. In the case of cardiac surgery and angioplasty, a risk-adjusted mortality rate is the measurement used.

Mortality rate means the percentage of patients who die in the hospital after heart surgery. For many reasons, some heart surgery patients face a greater risk of dying during heart surgery than others. For example, they may be older, or sicker, or have other complications. Since the risk level of patients treated at each hospital varies, the Department of Health identifies risk factors and uses a statistical model to estimate what a hospital's mortality rate would have been if each hospital had identical patients. The result is a risk-adjusted mortality rate that accounts for differences in severity of illness.