Best and Worst Hospital Death Rates

Best and Worst Hospital Death Rates

USA Today has created a useful display of the death rates at hospitals across the country.

USA Today offers:

• FULL MAP Compare hospitals near you on heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia
• STANDOUTS Hospitals with highest and lowest death rates
• ON THE WEB Compare hospitals in your ZIP code

The story reveals how USA Today got the data that will be made available to everybody:

Until today, hospital death rates were closely guarded secrets, discussed in board rooms but beyond the reach of patients whose lives are on the line. That changed (Wednesday) morning when USA Today posted on its Web site the government's best estimates of heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia death rates for every U.S. hospital for two years.

Now anyone with access to a computer can directly compare a local hospital with the one across town to see how it stacks up against the biggest medical institutions nationwide.

Death rates from heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia are widely viewed as yardsticks of a hospital's overall performance.

"We're in an era of change at last," says Donald Berwick, president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a non-profit in Cambridge, Mass., that works with hospitals to improve care and eliminate errors.

Compare hospitals

Last year, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a broad comparison of death rates for heart attacks and heart failure, noting how hospitals compared with the national average -- better, worse or no different -- without releasing the death rates themselves.

This year the agency decided to disclose them to consumers.

The agency shared the information in advance with USA Today to reach the widest possible audience. The agency also posted its new mortality estimates on a government Web site (hospitalcompare.hhs.gov), along with more than two dozen other measures of how well hospitals meet patients' needs.