Fewer Patients Die At Hospitals With Good Grades

Patients who needed one of the procedures included, repair of an aneurysm in the aorta, or a weakness in the wall of a major blood vessel going from the heart, had a 2.4% chance of dying if they went to a 5-star hospital and an 8% chance of dying if they went to a 1-star hospital.

Patients who went into the hospital with heart failure had a mortality rate of 3.3% at 5-star hospitals and a 6.9% mortality rate at 1-star hospitals.

“If all hospitals performed at the level of a 5-star rated hospital across the 18 procedures and diagnoses studied, 273,137 Medicare lives could have potentially been saved from 2002-2004,” the HealthGrades researchers write in their report.

Half of the unnecessary deaths resulted from weaknesses in quality of care for heart failure, community-acquired pneumonia, sepsis and respiratory failure, the researchers write.