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| Three Rivers Community Hospital |
Three Rivers Community Hospital 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.
The average age of residents in Josephine County is higher than the state average, and may be a contributing factor to the higher mortality. All in-hospital mortalities are reviewed for improvement purposes.
Comments last updated: June 30, 2005
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