"Hospital Ranks Low in Study"

Danville Register & Bee
Saturday, June 23, 2007

DANVILLE - The beleaguered Danville Regional Medical Center received yet another blow to its reputation on Friday when it landed on a list of seven hospitals ranked below the nationwide mortality rates for heart attacks. For the first time ever, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a division of the Health and Human Services posted its rankings online of more than 4,800 hospitals nationwide.
Danville was one of seven hospitals that ranked worse than the national rate. It was the only one out of 80 hospitals in Virginia that ranked below the national average.
Seventeen hospitals nationwide ranked above the national rate. However, Dr. Michael Moore, the hospital’s chief medical officer, said that several factors must be taken into account when considering the report. “We take these reports extremely seriously,” he said. “The first thing that is important to note, though, is that the report looks at a period from July 2005 to July 2006, and even before the report came out, we have been fully engaged in a process of improvements for all cardio-vascular care … and have implemented new methods to monitor cardio-vascular care.”
Moore said improvements include conducting educational activities for the hospital and medical staff and a continuous quality improvement program. He said another point is that the study is a 30-day mortality study, so even if a patient had good care and died within 30 days after leaving the hospital from other causes, that counts as a mortality in the study.
“Of course,” he said, “you assume each hospital has the same risk.”
Other issues that figure into Danville’s higher mortality rate, according to Moore, is that the area is high in other co-morbidity conditions like malnourishment and liver problems that affect heart attack and failure survival rates. “We also live in economically challenging times, and patients come in sicker and don’t have the resources at home for follow-up care,” he said.
He also noted that in November of 2006, the American Heart Association recognized the hospital for its heart failure care in its “Getting with the Guidelines” program. “That to me was a wonderful marker, and we will continue to do that,” Moore said.
“The major message is that the data is a year old and the hospital has been engaged every day in improving these things.”

BELOW AVERAGE
NEW STUDY: The following seven hospitals, listed alphabetically, ranked below the national rate for death from heart attack:
Sparks Regional Medical Center, Arkansas
Yuma Regional Medical Center, Arizona
Kingman Regional Medical Center, Arizona
Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Center of Brooklyn, Queens, New York
Southern Ohio Medical Center, Ohio
Christus St. Michael Health System, Texas
Danville Regional Medical Center, Virginia

Q&A:
Q: Who did the data include?
: Patients who are on original Medicare.
Q: How was the data produced?
A: Through a complex mathematical model that relied on Medicare claims and enrollment information. The model predicts patient deaths for any cause within 30 days of hospital admission for heart attack or heart failure, whether death occurs inside or outside of hospital.
Q: Why is 30 days used?
A: Thirty days is the time period when deaths are most likely to be related to the care patients received in the hospital.

For more information, go to http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/, source of this information.