Failure or delay in recognizing and responding to a hospitalized patient who is experiencing a complication after surgery.
Failure to rescue is a quality metric that reflects a hospital’s caliber of post-operative care. It’s measured as a percentage or rate of surgical inpatients who experience a hospital-acquired complication and die. On its consumer-facing website, Care Compare, CMS reports it as “deaths among patients with serious treatable complications after surgery.” The metric gained traction following research published in 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine that linked effective management of complications, rather than complication rates, to variability in surgical mortality among U.S. hospitals.