BOSTON Patients are more likely to receive high quality of care in not-for-profit hospitals and in hospitals with more registered nurses and advanced technology, reports a comprehensive Harvard Medical School (HMS) analysis published in the Dec. 11 Archives of Internal Medicine.
Bruce Landon, MD, MBA, associate professor of health care policy at HMS, and colleagues found that overall, not-for-profit hospitals consistently performed better than for-profit hospitals when it came to delivering high-quality care for three common medical conditions: congestive heart failure (CHF); heart attack (acute myocardial infarction, AMI); and pneumonia. Hospitals with higher registered nurse staffing levels, more advanced technology, and federal or military designation all had high performance.
"Our study is the first to comprehensively examine the characteristics of hospitals that are associated with higher quality of care for these three important medical conditions," said Landon, who is also an associate professor of medicine at HMS and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
This study assessed the quality of care for CHF, AMI, and pneumonia in more than 4,000 hospitals in the U.S. that reported data to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations or the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Since the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, hospitals have been required to report their performance on 10 measures in the areas of CHF, AMI, and pneumonia in order to receive their full Medicare payment update. The study also examined what hospital characteristics (such as ownership, size, location, teaching status, and proportion of Medicare or Medicaid admissions) were associated with high-quality performance.
In addition, the authors created an index to assess how the number of registered nurse staffing levels affected quality of care. Hospitals with more registered nurses performed better on all quality measures, howe
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Contact: Leah Gourley
public_affairs@hms.harvard.edu
617-432-0442
Harvard Medical School
11-Dec-2006