A Cleveland Clinic-led research team has developed a system for comparing the quality of care that hospitals and individual physicians provide.
Dr. Daniel Sessler, chair of the Clinic’s Department of Outcomes Research, led the team, which used billing and procedure codes from 35 million patient records to develop the system, according to a statement from Cleveland Clinic. The researchers call their system the Risk Stratification Index.
“Comparisons only make sense after adjusting for baseline risk and the risks associated with different operations,” Sessler said. “Our Risk Stratification Index allows for an accurate and fair comparison among hospitals using only publicly available data.”
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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has its own hospital quality measurement system, called Hospital Compare.
Hospital quality is generally measured by comparing data among hospitals on factors that include mortality, hospital readmissions and length of patient hospital stays. Researchers hope that publishing data about care quality will lead to lower healthcare costs when patients veer toward facilities that perform the best and offer the best outcomes.