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| Rogue Valley Medical Center |
Rogue Valley Medical Center Comments on Heart Attack:
This AHRQ Quality Indicator represents the current state-of-the-art in assessing quality of care using hospital administrative data. However, this indicator must be used cautiously, because the administrative data on which the indicator is based is not collected for research purposes or for measuring quality of care, but for billing purposes. While these data are relatively inexpensive and convenient to use—and represent a rich data source that can provide valuable information—they should not be used as a definitive source of information on quality of health care. At least three limitations of administrative data warrant caution:
- Coding of information is different across hospitals. Some hospitals code more thoroughly than others, making “fair” comparisons across hospitals difficult.
- Ambiguity about when a condition occurs. Most administrative data cannot distinguish unambiguously whether a specific condition was present at admission or whether it occurred during the stay (i.e., a possible complication).
- The codes themselves are often not specific enough to adequately characterize a patient’s condition, which makes it impossible to perfectly risk-adjust any administrative data set, thus fair comparisons across hospitals become difficult.
Rogue Valley Medical Center is a regional referral center for southern Oregon and northern California. The average age of residents in Jackson County is higher than the state average, and may be a contributing factor to the higher mortality. In addition, Rogue Valley Medical Center is the target hospital for the ASSET program. In this program, patients having a heart attack and needing the services of a cardiac catheterization laboratory are immediately brought to Rogue Valley Medical Center, bypassing other hospitals without the necessary cardiac care facilities. All in-hospital mortalities are reviewed for improvement purposes.
Comments last updated: June 30, 2005
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