Study Highlights

Among the findings in the HealthGrades Patient Safety in American Hospitals study are as follows:

About 1.14 million patient-safety incidents occurred among the 37 million hospitalizations in the Medicare population over the years 2000-2002.



Of the total 323,993 deaths among Medicare patients in those years who developed one or more patient-safety incidents, 263,864, or 81 percent, of these deaths were directly attributable to the incident(s).



One in every four Medicare patients who were hospitalized from 2000 to 2002 and experienced a patient-safety incident died.



The 16 patient-safety incidents accounted for $8.54 billion in excess in-patient costs to the Medicare system over the three years studied. Extrapolated to the entire U.S., an extra $19 billion was spent and more than 575,000 preventable deaths occurred from 2000 to 2002.



Patient-safety incidents with the highest rates per 1,000 hospitalizations were failure to rescue, decubitus ulcer and postoperative sepsis, which accounted for almost 60 percent of all patient-safety incidents that occurred.



Overall, the best performing hospitals (hospitals that had the lowest overall patient safety incident rates of all hospitals studied, defined as the top 7.5 percent of all hospitals studied) had five fewer deaths per 1000 hospitalizations compared to the bottom 10th percentile of hospitals. This significant mortality difference is attributable to fewer patient-safety incidents at the best performing hospitals.



Fewer patient safety incidents in the best performing hospitals resulted in a lower cost of $740,337 per 1,000 hospitalizations as compared to the bottom 10th percentile of hospitals.

Distinguished Hospital Awards and Findings

In addition to its findings on patient safety, HealthGrades today honored 88 hospitals in 23 states with the Distinguished Hospital Award for Patient Safety, the first national hospital award to focus purely on hospital patient safety. The award was designed to highlight hospitals with the best records of patient safety in the nation and to encourage consumers to research their local hospitals before undergoing a procedure.

HealthGrades based the awards on a detailed study of patient safety events in hospitals nationwide from 2000 to 2002, using the list of patient-safety incidents developed by AHRQ. "Best" hospitals were identified as the top 7.5 percent of the hospitals studied and had significantly different patient-safety incident rates and costs compared to hospitals that were average or in the bottom 10th percentile. Among the "best" hospitals, the lower number of avoidable deaths and in-patient hospital costs were directly related to their lower overall patient-safety incident rates.

"If all the Medicare patients who were admitted to the bottom 10th percentile of hospitals from 2000 to 2002 were instead admitted to the "best" hospitals, approximately 4,000 lives and $580 million would have been saved," said Dr. Collier.