The Boston Globe‘s Liz Kowalczyk reports that, two years after it was first proposed by a consumer group, the Massachusetts Health Care Quality and Cost Council has decided it won’t publish hospital-wide mortality rates. The problem, it seems, is the lack of an accurate, universal method of computing such numbers.
Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, who heads the group that made the decision, said current methodology for calculating hospital-wide mortality rates is so flawed that officials do not believe it would be useful to hospitals and patients and could harm public trust in government.
It appears, Kowalczyk writes, that general hospital mortality rates just aren’t “ready for prime time” quite yet.
The council convened an expert panel, which worked with researchers to evaluate software of four companies for measuring hospital mortality. The problem was that researchers came out with vastly different results when they used the various methodologies to calculate hospital mortality between 2004 and 2007 in Massachusetts, and they could not tell which company’s results — or if any — were accurate.
