State drops idea of posting hospital-wide death rates

Two years ago, Health Care for All, a Boston-based consumer advocacy group, asked the state's Health Care Quality and Cost Council to look at making public hospital-wide mortality rates.

The federal government and the state now publish mortality rates for certain individual procedures and conditions, such as pneumonia and heart attacks, but the hope was one hospital-wide rate for all patients '"would be a proxy for understanding the overall quality of care and safety at a hospital," Bigby said.

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.

"In every year there were at least a couple of hospitals ranked as having low mortality with one vendor, and high mortality with another," said Dr. Kenneth Sands, senior vice president of health care quality at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a member of the expert panel. "That hospital could either be eviscerated or rewarded depending on which vendor you choose."

Deborah Wachenheim, consumer health quality coordinator for Health Care for All and another member of the expert panel, said despite the group's initial interest, hospital-wide death rates aren't ready for prime time.

"You want information out there, but you want to make sure it's good information," she said.