Healthcare: Report Finds Improved Performance by Hospitals

In the latest advance for health care accountability, the country's leading hospital accreditation board, the Joint Commission, released a list on Tuesday of 405 medical centers that have been the most diligent in following protocols to treat conditions like heart attack and pneumonia.

Finally ...

Assessing more than 12 million treatment actions, like whether heart attack patients are given aspirin upon admission or surgical patients receive antibiotics within an hour, the commission found that hospitals followed standards 97% of the time. That is up from 82% in 2002.

In addition, more than nine in 10 hospitals had composite compliance scores of at least 90%, more than four times the figure of nine years ago.

“Reputation and performance on important measures of quality do not always correlate,” said Dr. Mark R. Chassin, the Joint Commission's president.

As an example, none of the 17 medical centers listed by U.S. News & World Report on its “Best Hospitals Honor Roll” this year are on the Joint Commission's list of 405 hospitals that received at least a 95% composite score for compliance with treatment standards. About one-third of a hospital's score in the U.S. News methodology is based on its reputation as gauged by a survey of physicians.

For more, see Report Finds Improved Performance by Hospitals by Kevin Sack, September 14, 2011 at NYTimes.com.