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May not be reprinted or reproduced without permission from Health Grades, Inc.
Hospital Quality GuideTM Methodology 2007-2008
Introduction
The HealthGrades Hospital Quality GuideTM provides the following types of information for hospitals:
·
Data Sources
·
Service Area Ratings
·
Medical Issues Rating Methodologies
·
Patient Safety
·
Safe Practices
·
Cost
·
Length of Stay
·
Distance from Search Origination
·
Data Model Limitations
Data Sources
Health Grades quality ratings are derived from the following data sources:
·
Medicare inpatient data from the MedPAR database purchased from the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services (MedPAR database) based upon hospitalized Medicare patients for years 2004
through 2006.
·
Inpatient data for maternity care, women's health, bariatric surgery, and appendectomy provided by
19 states who provide this all-payer data (AZ, CA, FL, IA, MA, MD, ME, NC, NJ, NV, NY, OR, PA,
RI, TX, UT, VA, WA, and WI) for years 2003 through 2005.
HealthGrades provides a choice to view hospital information using either Medicare inpatient data or
inpatient state data. This choice is not available when:
·
The medical issue is appendectomy, maternity care, women's health, bariatric surgery, or general
quality information.
·
The search area is located in a state that does not provide inpatient data (all patients).
Service Area Ratings
To help consumers evaluate and compare hospital performance, HealthGrades analyzed patient outcome
data for virtually every hospital in the country. HealthGrades analyzed and assigned quality ratings to
different service areas. The rating of each service area is a combined rating of one or more medical issues
(e.g., heart attack). The following descriptions show how HealthGrades calculated each of the following
service area ratings.
