Heart attack survival tied to hospitals
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SINGAPORE - Patients who suffer a heart attack or heart failure may be as much as three times more likely to die in some US hospitals than in others, researchers from Yale University School of Medicine found.
Hospitals in Arkansas and California were among those with the highest death rates; those in Northeastern states such as Massachusetts and New Jersey had the lowest.
One in four patients with heart failure (when the heart can’t pump enough blood to the rest of the body) and one in five who had a heart attack (when the supply of blood to the heart is interrupted) were readmitted within 30 days, a sign of “uniformly poor performance’’ among hospitals nationwide, the researchers wrote. The study did not name individual hospitals.
The study “suggests that patients’ outcomes are dependent, at least in part, on the hospital,’’ Harlan Krumholz, who led the study, said in an e-mail.
